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Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
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Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#42The cards are definitely stacked against this when it's at Google. Because of: 1. Google's solid track record of killing things because they didn't grow quickly, after a half hearted effort. Stadia being the latest example. 2. Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate its lunch. 3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat,…
It's a super fun thing to be the first person to comment about #1 on literally everything Google does, but it's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism.
For every product Google kills, it's launched dozens of wildly successful products you've been taking for granted for over a decade in some cases: Gmail, search, Drive, Photos, Chromecast, Chrome, Books, Flights, Scholar, AdSense, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Translate, Maps...
Google can and does support dozens of good products, and pretending otherwise is getting tiresome. If your best criticism is, "I dunno if Google will support this long term" that, to me, means you couldn't come up with anything better to say, which means it's a pretty damn cool product.
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#43The cards are definitely stacked against this when it's at Google. Because of: 1. Google's solid track record of killing things because they didn't grow quickly, after a half hearted effort. Stadia being the latest example. 2. Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate its lunch. 3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat,…
Meet is pretty dang solid, and is pretty much exclusively used for “work” or anything related to a calendar invite. The rest of their video chat seems to be reserved for P2P/personal communications.
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#44No post body was provided.
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#451. Echoing all the comments here, can’t see google keeping this around for 5+ years 2. I feel like the main thing holding back a normal video meeting or even voice call is latency - latency leads to the awkward pauses or interruptions that for me cause the most “connection friction”. If anyone here has talked on an actual landline recently, it feels qualitatively better than a teams voice call for example due to the…
Latency isn't actually that hard to fix: if both connections are wired (both internet and headphones / speakers) you can get round trip latency down to about 15ms which is good enough to feel immediate and on par with POTS.
It's just a matter of getting your coworkers onto ethernet, and convincing them to give up their Bluetooth headphones...
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#46I'm struggling to believe Google will see this through beyond a tech demo. And who's the target audience? I mean, what would a unit's cost be? Looks like another cool tech Google won't be able to productize successfully. Edit: I was super excited for Soli way back when, but so far haven't see any smart clothes they were imagining in the early days.
I think you'd see this with some c-suites types or VCs who have money to throw around and possibly designers who want to give better sense of prototypes to colleagues from afar
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#471. Echoing all the comments here, can’t see google keeping this around for 5+ years 2. I feel like the main thing holding back a normal video meeting or even voice call is latency - latency leads to the awkward pauses or interruptions that for me cause the most “connection friction”. If anyone here has talked on an actual landline recently, it feels qualitatively better than a teams voice call for example due to the…
I think there has been some research suggesting that lack of eye contact (the camera is not where the person's face is) has a really large unconcious affect on how people interact.
Apple fixed this[0] but I don’t personally use FaceTime much so I’d be interested to see if people find it creepy or better.
0: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/how-to-use-eye-cont...
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#48I'm struggling to believe Google will see this through beyond a tech demo. And who's the target audience? I mean, what would a unit's cost be? Looks like another cool tech Google won't be able to productize successfully. Edit: I was super excited for Soli way back when, but so far haven't see any smart clothes they were imagining in the early days.
One audience may be courts. A great deal of time, effort, and money goes into high-quality telepresence (at least in my area) for offenders who cannot attend court (due to COVID, the nature of their offense, etc).
As other commenters have mentioned in this thread, there are lots of unconscious (and fully conscious) biases against interaction over video conference, and a key function of the courts is to eliminate bias from the judicial system.
This, obviously, is much less "sexy" than slick co-working and corporate spaces, so Google doesn't advertise it; but I would be surprised if courts weren't one of the early adopters if this technology becomes commercially viable.
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point being competitors are pouring billions into VR meetings, but this project at google is getting little attention.
Google R&D projects don't have the longevity reputation, so they might not deserve attention.
Google AI R&D projects seem to do well. The transformer which Google AI released is the basis of a lot of modern ML projects
Re: Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
#50Something I think which really needs to be discussed. Why do tech companies always put a token black person in their PR videos but yet their hiring doesn't reflect that?