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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

#421

Post by intricatedetail »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #303
ProAm wrote: post #138

Id just be really uncomfortable with google monitoring, recording and analyzing my personal communications to sell me ads or worse later. Everything google does now feels.... invasive for lack of a better word. This is something Id like to see from Apple, and Im not an Apple fan at all.

> Google Cloud (which offers Meet) doesn't use customer data for advertising. Google Cloud doesn't sell customer data to third parties. https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9852160?hl=en-GB#zipp... Why would this be any different?

How can you prove they don't do that?

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

#422

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Things like this make me feel more and more disassociated with science fiction TV shows / films. I'm sure they intentionally don't make communications too good, because then - with tech like this - people would go "lame, that's just the other actor in a box behind a glass pane", instead of "oo that is cool sci fi technology".

I mean we used to marvel at things like Star Trek, but nowadays a smartphone is miles ahead of a lot of "day to day" things they showed in there. Foldable screens are coming too, and now this.

I mean I don't believe this thing will be commonplace at all in the near future, but it's still cool. I think it'll be integrated into smartphones within the decade though. It's already mostly possible with the front-facing camera + light field of iphones, plus AR, plus motion sensor technology, plus the load of processing power they put in there.

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

#423

Post by meowface »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #422

Things like this make me feel more and more disassociated with science fiction TV shows / films. I'm sure they intentionally don't make communications too good, because then - with tech like this - people would go "lame, that's just the other actor in a box behind a glass pane", instead of "oo that is cool sci fi technology". I mean we used to marvel at things like Star Trek, but nowadays a smartphone is miles ahead…

Makes you wonder in what ways our contemporary sci-fi is going to look totally off-base in 50 years.

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

#424

Post by varjag »

wpietri wrote: post #364
golfer wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you talk to daily Instagram users, you'll find out what problem it solves. In particular, it was the lucky winner in the crowd of early photo-sharing-on-mobile apps. But the demand for that was proven by early photo sharing successes like Flickr. Realizing people would want to do that on their pocket camera device is not a big leap given what people were already doing to share photos from their mid-aughts cameraph…

I (and probably everyone in immigrant communities) will get such a thing to my family and our parents as soon as we can afford it.

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

#425

Post by estaseuropano »

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…

Just very practically, is this a $xxxx.xx improvement over simple video chat with a large screen and simple camera? Will this even work without low-latency high-bandwidth connection up and down?

It seems more like an art project than a tech usable in the coming decade.

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

#426

Post by kjakm »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #346
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.

NB: Apple Maps also has a dedicated Mac app.

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

#427

Post by supermatt »

crazygringo wrote: post #342
shahar2k wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

if you look at the video you can see there are artifacts around the hair. It is likely applying some matting via AI to make it less obvious, but it is still there.

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

#428

Post by karlkloss »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #104
aerovistae wrote: post #10

This reminds me of the devices described in the short story "The Story of Your Life", which is the basis of the movie Arrival. Excellent, excellent story and very different from the movie, if anyone's into that kind of thing.

I definitely got vibes of the "viewing" tech from Asimov's "The Naked Sun", always exciting to see sci-fi tech reach the real world.

Came here to say that. Asimov was one of the few SF authors that not only imagined advanced technology, but also could see what it would do to society.

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

#430

Post by gearhart »

tomklein wrote: post #417
closeparen wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could imagine commercial/institutional sites hundreds to thousands of miles apart with <10ms latency on dedicated fiber.

Wouldn’t that be way faster than the speed of light?

Depends how many thousands ;) light travels about 3000km in 10ms

https://www.google.com/search?q=speed+of+light+*+10ms

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