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Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

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Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#341

Post by Mangalor »

rexreed wrote: post #315

Side note - why does it feel like so many of Google's products, and especially their most core offerings are in a state of ongoing decay? Search is getting worse. Maps today is worse than maps 10 years ago. Even their Google home assistants, YouTube, Gmail, and other products just seem to be steadily creeping into more annoyances and less usability. There was a time I felt that Google's search was head and shoulders…

To be fair, you would not want to be confronted with the reality of these products 10 years ago, there's been a million bug fixes that have been done since then. But I agree on Search, it's almost like they sabotaged it.

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#342

Post by crazygringo »

shahar2k wrote: post #148
imiric wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they're doing photogrammetry in real time, which is mind boggling. I'm not familiar with this space, but building a 3D model, texturing it with live video, compressing and sending that over the internet, and doing it with minimal latency for it to be believable/enjoyable? Incredible technical achievement if that's the approach. Using state of the art tech, no doubt, and probably lots of ML magic to smoo…

not that hard to do if you have actual depth sensing cameras, and even without those, something like the oculus quest 2 does that exact task (generate a rough 3d volume based on several 2d video feeds) you can see a neat example when you draw your guardian space, and move objects (and notice how it updates the 3d volume representation)

That's not true -- even with depth sensing cameras, it will still be full of artifacts, and things like curly hair or strands of hair will become disastrous because they're not easily geometrically modeled.

The Oculus Quest 2 doesn't do anything like what you're describing -- it essentially just pipes in stereoscopic video from its stereo cameras and stitches them together in a trivial way. It doesn't attempt to build geometric representations of objects in your environment at all.

(For guardian functionality it does very simple things like using the depth cloud to figure out the height of the floor, and if there are points inside the guardian that shouldn't be there, but that doesn't inferring object geometries.)

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#343

Post by crazygringo »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #337
abhv wrote: post #2

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…

Questions: How does this relate to advertising and the necessary surveillance to support it. Will this "product" be set up to phone home and "update" by default. Will the price be "free". Commercial viability. How much would someone pay for this.

Sheesh. Why the FUD?

It would presumably work exactly the same way as Google's existing videoconferencing hardware:

https://workspace.google.com/products/meet-hardware/

In other words, you pay market value for it, it doesn't include advertising, and Google is contractually obligated not to snoop on your content.

Which is why even Google competitors use this hardware, because the legal and technological protections are strong enough they don't worry about Google stealing their IP.

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#344

Post by crazygringo »

Pxtl wrote: post #128

This is cool as hell, but I have to say I feel like we're solving top-level problems when most consumers don't even seem to be getting solutions to the most basic pain-points. For me, the problem with video-calling isn't the image-quality. It's all the much more mundane technological problems - high latency, lag-spikes caused by bad ISPs, failed noise-cancellation for people who don't use headsets for audio, bad wifi…

Most of that Google can't do anything about, because it's not under their control.

And it's really a question of money. If you want to fix all those mundane problems you describe, literally every one can be addressed by renting a better pipe and buying and setting up better equipment.

This Google product is clearly designed for high-end offices that already have all of those things under control.

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#345

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

golfer wrote: post #310
suyash wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Instagram solves. It's just a fancy Myspace. Tell me a problem WhatsApp solves. It's just a fancy SMS. Tell me a problem X solves. It's just a fancy Y. Etc etc

Yes? Other than not being hip, how is Instagram better than Myspace? WhatsApp at least added features over SMS, although it sacrificed interoperability and went all-in on a closed system to get there. Newer is not always better.

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#346

Post by mcbutterbunz »

rexreed wrote: post #315

Side note - why does it feel like so many of Google's products, and especially their most core offerings are in a state of ongoing decay? Search is getting worse. Maps today is worse than maps 10 years ago. Even their Google home assistants, YouTube, Gmail, and other products just seem to be steadily creeping into more annoyances and less usability. There was a time I felt that Google's search was head and shoulders…

I would wager a guess that its due to lack of competition. Apple Maps only works on iOS. DDG is great but the search results aren’t. Does YouTube even have a competitor?

I don’t think you’re a curmudgeon at all. Circa 2008, Google was innovating in a lot of different areas that were very valuable to the average user. The ROI on these services has gone way down.

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#347

Post by crazygringo »

Does anyone have a clue how the light field display works?

Someone suggested this is the tech:

https://lookingglassfactory.com/tech

But it still has no explanation of what the "proprietary light field technology" is.

How do you get each pixel to show up as a different color with 45-100 separate angles?

I had no idea this actually existed in production!

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#348

Post by [deleted] »

rexreed wrote: post #315

Side note - why does it feel like so many of Google's products, and especially their most core offerings are in a state of ongoing decay? Search is getting worse. Maps today is worse than maps 10 years ago. Even their Google home assistants, YouTube, Gmail, and other products just seem to be steadily creeping into more annoyances and less usability. There was a time I felt that Google's search was head and shoulders…

[deleted]

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#349

Post by bschwindHN »

ashekara wrote: post #200

So cool. Anyone have more information about tonari ( https://tonari.no/ )? They were/are working on solving this “feel like you’re there” problem.

I work there currently, we still exist! We actually just published a blog post last week about how we use tonari internally:

https://blog.tonari.no/how-tonari-uses-tonari

Re: Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together

#350

Post by Sargos »

nmca wrote: post #149
airstrike wrote: post #108

This , my friends, is how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant. This is a beautifully executed idea and if the demos live up to expectation the hype may even be warranted. But on a much more fundamental level (i.e. fancy 3D imaging and spatial audio aside), this also possibly suggests people would benefit from dedicated videoconferencing hardware. TVs and telephones do one thing really well (or at least historic…

Entertainingly, the technology to real-time impersonate someone over zoom photorealistically is also rapidly approaching - the window of irrelevant travel might be small.

I don't think this will actually be a real problem as you can just sign the call with your identity which renders deep fakes useless.
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