Google’s Project Starline booths gave me a holographic meeting experience
What blew me away, though, was when he picked up an apple and held it out towards me. It was so realistic that I felt as if I could grab the fruit from his fist. We tried a few other things later — fist bumping and high fiving, and though we never actually made physical contact, the positioning of limbs on the call was accurate enough that we could grab the projections of each other’s fists.
The experience wasn’t perfect, of course. There were parts where, when Nartker and I were talking at the same time, I could tell he could not hear what I was saying. Every now and then, too, the graphics would blink or appear to glitch. But those were very minor issues, and overall the demo felt very refined. Some of the issues could even be chalked up to spotty event WiFi, and I can personally attest to the fact that the signal was indeed very shitty.
It’s also worth noting that Starline was basically getting the visual and audio data of me and Nartker, sending it to the cloud over WiFi, creating a 3D model of both of us, and then sending it down to the light display and speakers on the prototype. Some hiccups are more than understandable. While the earliest Starline prototypes took up entire rooms, the current version is smaller and easier to deploy. To that end, Google announced today that it had shared some units with early access partners including T-Mobile, WeWork and Salesforce. The company hopes to get real-world feedback to “see how Project Starline can help distributed workforces stay connected.”
We’re clearly a long way off from seeing these in our homes, but it was nice to get a taste of what Project Starline feels like so far. This was the first time media demos were available, too, so I’m glad I was able to check it out for myself and tell you about it instead of relying on Google’s own messaging. I am impressed by the realism of the projections, but I remain uncertain about how effectively this might substitute or complement in-person conversations.
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