Google’s magic window
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The Starline project, announced in 2021 at Google I / O, is based on a very specific idea: you can have a conversation with someone, from a distance, physically feeling in the same place. And above all without having to resort to a visor fastened on the head. To realize this more ‘natural’ idea of telepresence, Google has built a “magic window” – as it is informally called – that shows the interlocutors in 3D. The people who sit in the ‘cabin’, in front of the 65-inch monitor, are in fact filmed through a series of sensors (at least 16) and video cameras (at least 14). This allows you to produce a three-dimensional digital copy of them that will appear in the booth where the other connected person is located. The effect, as you can see in the video produced by Google on this page, appears ultra realistic. Even those who have tried it – here the impressions of a reporter from The Verge – maintain that the Starline project transforms a virtual call into a conversation in person.
With this machine, and its future evolutions, Google intends to conquer companies aiming for a hybrid work model. The price, in fact, is not for all budgets: it would not be less than 10 thousand dollars. But the biggest problem may not be Starline’s cost, but how useful it is. Seeing it now, the booth has obvious limitations: it only allows one-to-one and therefore is not suitable for corporate meetings that include several people. And in addition, the technology at the moment appears ‘closed’: to connect the 3D copies, two identical cabins are necessarily needed. Today a call on Teams, or Zoom or on Google Meet can be done from any notebook or smartphone. It is true that the future must begin somewhere, and the idea of Google makes sense, or at least represents an alternative to digital encounters that force you to take on the virtual clothes of an avatar made of pixels.
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