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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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>currently I don't have stereoscopic vision >my brain CAN do it, if I had the correct images sent to my eyes somehow. >when I watched Avatar, an actually well made 3D movie, it literally felt more real than reality Buy an Oculus Quest 2. (Or any VR headset, but that's the best value at the moment.) It sends seperate images to each eye. You should get that same 'more real than reality' feeling. It may even train your…

I'm someone with Amblyopia and would love to hear people's experiences using this. Seems like the project made some waves on reddit and kind of died down. I have bought Oculus Quest last year in anticipation of trying this but the pandemic and work pushed it out somewhat.

Watching 3D movies in the theaters just gives me a headache but Oculus actually works fine, I've played a few games and it was amazing...

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

#382
Is the technology used here for "tricking" the brain to simulate 3D the same as what Nintendo was using in the 3DS? If so, it carries a risk of developmental damage for the eyesight of children under 6, so as much as this might be cool they really shouldn't be showing kids using it, especially not babies.

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

#385

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!

I've been very curious about this too.

I believe there are two basic approaches.

The first is "lenticular lenses" -- the same technology used to make those shiny postcards that change depending on what angle you tilt them at.

Here's a site with an example GIF and kinda explains how it works: https://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/07/lenticular/

Normally, the lenticular lens is glued directly onto a printed sheet of paper, but you can instead glue it onto a _screen_, which lets you change the pixels underneath. There are a lot of challenges here; for example, the pixels are usually located a bit behind the glass, so the standard lenses used for printing won't focus perfectly on a screen.

There's also another, simpler approach called "parallax barrier". This is what the 3DS used. Instead of using lenses to bend light, it _blocks_ the light coming out of certain pixels at certain angles. It's basically just an opaque sheet with periodic slits (the 3DS uses an LCD, so that 3D can be turned off by becoming transparent). Before I found a video of someone making one themselves using an iPhone and transparency sheets, but I can't find it at the moment...

3DS parallax barrier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-LzRT7Bvc0

Diagram from Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_barrier#/media/File:P...

A big disadvantage of parallax-barrier is that you end up blocking a lot of the screen, making the image darker.

Supposedly you can combine the two approaches to reduce the darkness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetX2C3AdCI

There are probably even more tricks involved, and this is all a lot easier-said-than-done.

Here's a project that uses an LCD to make a dynamic parallax-barrier, that increases brightness by skipping the barriers wherever they don't matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrRnURU1W3E

Tangent: There's also been some attempts to do _the reverse_, and use distorted lenses in front of a camera to recover a 3D scene using only a single camera:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3072959.3073589 (link has a SIGGRAPH talk recorded which shows example results)

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

#387
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…

The poor you will always have with you

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would certainly sit comfortably in a black mirror episode, lol.

A fantastic twist would be a reveal showing that the other person (no longer) exists in the real world and is digital construct... or some forbidden knowledge is secretly interdicted and censored by big brother, body-snatching peoples avatars in real time.

Plot twist: the person behind the screen is actually sat there, everything else turns out to be a hologram!

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

#389
post #46
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…

My mind was also blown when I got to demo this a few years ago. You sit down and you forget that there's technology happening. The person is there, in front of you. I don't know how else to describe it. The testimonials in the video aren't exaggerating compared to my experience.

I suspect this worked because the person was, indeed, there.

I mean, not in the same room, but down the hall or so.

You can have the most perfect rendering in the world and 100ms of latency will be enough to make the experience miserable.

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

#390
post #8

I get similar vibes to demoing VR the first time. My first thought was, "My tech-illiterate dad would have his mind _blown_ by this." Unfortunately, even an already-set-up VR experience was too strange/unnatural for him so he never got to experience it. However, this looks easy/natural to use and set up and feels like it'd have a similar mind-blowing effect for many of the older generations, which I think is a good i…

The "wow it's really 3D" effect without glasses is what people experience everytime I've shown Looking Glass to someone, glad to see devices with higher resolution are coming and more people in the market, end users will benefit from more concurrence to drive the quality up.
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