We tried Starline, the Google project that will kill Teams

At Google they say that “at the moment this technology is at its lowest point” and that “it can only get better from here”. But already what we see now, and that we were able to try previewed at the I/O 2023 conference, it’s quite impressive. It is difficult to explain in words.

Its name is Project Starline and can be described as something in between Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatars (those from Horizon Workroomsto understand) and the holograms of the films of Star Wars. But better than both.

youtube: the new version of Project Starline

A “magic window” for video conferencing

The idea behind Project Starline is to create a new communication system between distant people in the world, such as Teams, Meet, Zoom or precisely Workrooms: it was not born with the pandemic, because in Mountain View “we have been working on this for 5-6 years now”. The novelty is that they have created a new version of it and have made it accessible to a limited number of partners, such as T-Mobile, Salesforce and WeWork, for them to use it, give their opinions and suggest possible uses. The other novelty is that they finally allow people to try it.

Which is what we did: we sat in a room of one of the many Google headquarters in Mountain Viewone of the Project Starline developers sat down in another (but “I could be halfway around the world and it would still work”) and we started chatting through what they look like two huge televisionswhere each of us appeared in front of the other, reconstructed in 3D in an honestly incredible way.

Screens are the heart of Project Starline: Google calls them “magic windows” through which to “talk, gesture and make eye contact with another person, life-size and in 3 dimensions”. The screens, but also the cameras positioned above, to the right and to the left: they take bursts of photos of the two interlocutors, who an artificial intelligence processes in real time to recreate its appearance and movements. The data is sent to a Google data center and back within moments.

And the effect (yes, we have already said it) is impressive: during our contact we were able to clearly notice the movements of the eyes of the person in front of us and those of his hands, which seemed to come out of the screen about ten centimeters when he moved them in front of us, so much so that before leaving we tried to squeeze them to say goodbye. Obviously without success. Similarly, when he handed us an apple that he physically had with him in her room, we hesitated but then tried to grab her, deluding ourselves that Project Starline could also give birth to some form of teleportation. It’s not like that, but it looks like it.

in the video below, the previous version of Project Starline

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The problems: the amount of data and the hardware

In Google’s intentions, this technology would be perfect not just for business meetingsvideoconferences, remote interviews but also “for medical applicationsso that doctor and patient can somehow meet, or for shopsto welcome customers wherever they are in the world”.

It would be perfect for doing what (more or less) the apps mentioned at the beginning do, di companies like Microsoft or Metabut it has two problems that we couldn’t help but notice, as impressed as we were by what we had just seen: the computational ability necessary to process the amount of data generated by the cameras and the predictable hardware cost which is needed to make everything work.

Two obstacles of which Google are well aware: “At the moment we do all the calculations in the cloud, in our datacenters, but in the future it is not improbable that there will be computer that can handle everything on its own, even in people’s homes,” project manager Andrew Nartker told us. Likewise, “future televisions could be quite easily converted to become screens suitable for use in Project Starline as well, receiving the data feed from the cameras and showing three-dimensional images of the participants in the conversation”.

At the moment it is Impossible to get an idea of ​​prices, which will presumably be prohibitively expensive for individual users at first. But the point for now is not this: the point is that this technology exists, it exists, it has already been improved and will improve further. And when it’s accessible, virtual encounters between Darth Vader and the Emperor will no longer seem like just the stuff of science fiction.

@capoema