231–240 of 539 posts
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The question for me is how much it matters after the novelty wears off. I count at least 5 waves of 3D technology starting in 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. Each time there's a surge of popularity driven by the legitimately amazing initial experience. And each time people slowly stop caring. People were incredibly excited about Avatar, and many thought it would change the movie industry. But how many people now…
Exactly, it's just a fancy FaceTime technology, I would be bored after few days. Tell me a problem that it solves.
Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely than video and 2D displays will ever do. That's a noble research goal if nothing else, I don't get the skepticism.
There are several reasons 3D content and previous generation displays didn't take off, but there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century and are only now becoming popular). AFAICT the real time photogrammetry they're using here along with the no-glasses 3D display is a major leap forward. If they can get it cheap and reliable enough to mass market, it would be a game changer.
I certainly know what kind of display and teleconferencing software I want when the next pandemic hits, and it's not what we have now.
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Agreed, 10Mbps is likely where it'll be, probably less. If I were to guess, they are going to apply a lot of smarts to texture mapping to avoid needing a lot of bandwidth.
Doubtful, IMO. The fact that you need it to be both extremely low latency and with essentially zero compression artifacts (probably lossless, based on their goal). If the numbers listed here[1] are correct, then the most efficient lossy codec at that time was doing 100 minutes of 8k video in ~37GB of data. From that we can intuit that it was using an average of 50 Mbps for that 100 minutes of video. For the most effi…
That said, my intuition is they aren't doing a pure video encoding solution. The fact that they talk about 3d modeling leads me to believe they are doing a combination of model + texture to get the realistic results. That would significantly decrease the amount of bandwidth and computational power needed. Over a low bandwidth situation you'd simply need to send model updates and do some smart interpolation to determine what things should look like.
Similar to the concept that playing a 3d game requires MB of resources but recording the same game at 8k would require a boatload more memory.
My assumption is they are using LIDAR to get a good model, high quality cameras to texture things, and a nice AI to stitch things together and interpolate when data isn't arriving fast enough.
This is a really interesting project, and I wonder how long until Google unceremoniously cancels it and drops support for anyone who's bought into it.
This is getting downvoted but it really is a valid concern. Google’s been losing users on each discontinuation and only the most pro-Google techies I know are still jumping in to something new, especially given the trend towards one cool feature and a bunch of “QA is boring” stuff which will take a year to get fixed. Given their past reputation, it’s really cautionary as a shareholder to hear C-level questions about…
(It's probably also not true, when compared to Google's peers. Amazon and Microsoft similarly throw a bunch of stuff on the wall, and unceremoniously kill the failures, but neither their launches nor cancellations get this reaction.)
A good friend of mine at Google is the technical lead of this project (he has a Phd Princeton, and was a professor before joining Google). I've tried it in person and it was truly amazing. They used some very fancy tech when I saw the demo, so I'm thrilled it is finally being announced and possibly shared with a larger audience. Explanation of why it is amazing: It totally fools your perception. No glasses or goggles…
I want to try this just to see what happens, if I will have again the feeling something is more real than reality. Because optometrists are illegal in my country (here only medics can decide what glasses you can use), currently I don't have stereoscopic vision, although my brain CAN do it, if I had the correct images sent to my eyes somehow. (one of my eyes muscles is slightly shorter than the other side thus the ima…
I'm asking in case I might need to look for one in the future.
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How much would you pay? I expect the lower end to be around $20,000 from hardware alone, plus at least gigabit down/up connectivity.
probably built into smartphones in 10 years.
On a related note, I wanted to share my amazing experience with a similar but lo-fi tech. My mom and dad for the past 2-3 years have mostly lived in two separate countries (due to work reasons) and I could tell they miss each other quite a bit. I got both of them an Echo Show 10" device each and set it up for them. I don't think I can explain how our lives have changed for the better, just based on this simple piece…
I remember when I used to be in a long distance relationship with my now wife. We used to have the laptops on Skype for hours just to have each other's company, even if we were studying or doing something else. It was very unique at the time.
I'm quite jealous cuz back then we didn't have Echo Show, it'd probably be used just like your parents use it.
A good friend of mine at Google is the technical lead of this project (he has a Phd Princeton, and was a professor before joining Google). I've tried it in person and it was truly amazing. They used some very fancy tech when I saw the demo, so I'm thrilled it is finally being announced and possibly shared with a larger audience. Explanation of why it is amazing: It totally fools your perception. No glasses or goggles…
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Exactly, it's just a fancy FaceTime technology, I would be bored after few days. Tell me a problem that it solves.
> Tell me a problem that it solves. Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely than video and 2D displays will ever do. That's a noble research goal if nothing else, I don't get the skepticism. There are several reasons 3D content and previous generation displays didn't take off, but there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this (e.g. electric…
That's not a problem people express much, at least not in ways where "3D" points to a solution. When I want to see people in person, it's not because of a lack of stereoscopy. I want to hug them, to break bread with them.
> there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this
There is indeed! In specific, the many times we have already had revolutionary new approaches and products that were met with great enthusiasm in the market for a few years.
I'd add that the telephone was not only a very successful technology for a century, audio calls still remain very popular. (I'm not sure what your work calls are like these days, but quite a lot of people turn off video in mine.) The lesson I take from that is that people mainly self-generate the feeling of interpersonal connection, and they can do it with very little in the way of cues. To me that's another strong indication that no new 3D technology will make much of a difference.