[HN Gopher] Project Starline expands testing through an early ac...
___________________________________________________________________
Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
Author : cpeterso
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-10-12 20:36 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| walrus01 wrote:
| > enterprise partners such as Salesforce, WeWork
|
| I see this as a negative and not a positive. I have very little
| to no desire to ever spend money with either of those or have
| involvement with things that they make extensive use of.
| taeric wrote:
| This makes all of the interactions look like interrogations. What
| am I missing?
| Lammy wrote:
| Same here, my first thought was that it looks like a prison
| visitation.
| xnx wrote:
| I hope I get to try this at a WeWork sometime soon.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I'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.
| alphabetting wrote:
| 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
| hammock wrote:
| Can I say that a Magic Window in my office sounds 1000x better
| than a magic headset that I have to wear (Meta Quest 2)
| FeistySkink wrote:
| It does. And so does a hologram. But it remains to be seen if
| Google can see a tech demo through, make a profitable
| product, and support it past the initial hype. I hope this
| time it does, but I wouldn't bet on it.
| vermilingua wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| Soli did seem cool. Wasn't Jacquard the smart clothing
| technology? Surprisingly, I think there are some products:
| https://atap.google.com/jacquard/products/
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Nest is doing some cool stuff with Soli on their hubs to
| monitor sleep patterns: https://www.xda-
| developers.com/google-nest-hub-soli-motion
|
| Disclosure: I work on Fuchsia which is now the OS for some of
| the Nest hubs (https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-
| fuchsia-nest-hub-ma...)
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I couldn't find either jackets for sale (broken links), and
| the promo videos were rather underwhelming. Seems like a
| smart watch can already do all of these, albeit in a less
| "cool" manner, and it's not tied to a piece of clothing. I
| was imagining something more cyberpunk, and not just an input
| device. Perhaps, that goes beyond what Soli tries to achieve.
|
| Edit: I can imagine more interesting use cases where you
| can't use precise input, for example when wearing gloves
| (construction, space suite, etc.).
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| October 2025. Google kills Project Starline
| judge2020 wrote:
| I'll add it to my calendar to let you know if you're correct :)
| cardosof wrote:
| How long until it either gets ads or cancelled?
| andreilys wrote:
| I expect this will be shut down a year after the people working
| on it get their promos.
| ggm wrote:
| If they've managed to embed the video collector at eye height or
| close, so the effect of looking at the screen is to be seen as
| looking at the other person, this is in itself useful. If it's
| still a non-eyeline camera and they do some adaptive smarts to
| make it "look" like eyeline I'd be interested how good that is.
|
| If they have leveraged peppers ghost and like techniques to make
| a volume appear to be "occupied" then it's possible this also
| helps with hinting to presence. I've seen some art displays which
| sort-of did this. It was remarkably pleasant to sit opposite
| people who you sort-of knew were not actually in the implied
| volume behind the screen.
|
| The influence of delay on perception of "there-ness" is huge. I
| would be interested how good this is at adjusting for unremovable
| lightspeed delay inter-continental. Not to over do it, it
| wouldn't surprise me if this works in SFO to NYC but works less
| well SFO to LHR or SFO to SIN.
|
| I tend to assume "applied ML" is marketing speak but its possible
| the investment in time to tune some net has made an FPGA cheap to
| deploy to do one job, and do it well, and over time be (re)tuned
| to do it better. This isn't welcome to new robot overlords, its
| just sensible use of technology to improve.
|
| I could see anything which does image processing like this also
| be applicable for people with persisting tic or tremor issues. It
| might help with stabilising image for their remote participation
| in online stuff.
|
| I totally prefer this kind of application of smarts, to what Meta
| are doing.
| aerovistae wrote:
| It's weird how this seems really exciting and yet the fact that
| it's a google project leaves me assured it will go nowhere, and
| therefore it's hard to take much of an interest in. Same as that
| cool automated phone call AI they demo'd a few years ago.
|
| Cool, but not likely to go anywhere in Google's hands.
|
| Product-wise, have they succeeded with anything in the past 10+
| years? Chrome is from before then. Android is from before then.
| Google Maps, Search, and Gmail are all from before then. I guess
| the Pixel was successful. Seems like everything else is
| incremental technical improvements of existing product lines.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I had forgotten about this. Discussion from last year:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199330
| a-dub wrote:
| i love how all the people in the demo videos are excessively and
| unnaturally expressive in order to show off how it captures
| depth.
|
| would be neat to try, would be curious how much the effect holds
| up over time (vs flat video conferencing) as people get used to
| it.
|
| interesting technology regardless.
| jsight wrote:
| [deleted]
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'm ok with the rebranding part. "Starline" sounds like a space
| Titanic.
|
| This is more like a big TV you can sit close to and other
| people in the room who move slowly from left to right will be
| able to see a parallax effect on the screen.
| neilv wrote:
| Can it reskin me as Tom Cruise?
| a1371 wrote:
| The 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 it's lunch.
|
| 3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in
| general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Duo, Alo, ... This already it's
| weird where this fits.
|
| 4. Google being bad at supporting new hardware gadgets. My
| Daydream VR came out 2 years before my Pixel, somehow these two
| things don't support each other.
|
| I wish they at least would sell their divisions instead of
| kill/hamper such moonshot products. This looks like the next
| Google Glass.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| 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.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| thank you. it's the definition of a middlebrow dismissal
| xani_ wrote:
| > 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...
|
| More like for every 10 products they kill they maybe let one
| live... Have you not seen killed by google ?
|
| > 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.
|
| It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're going to
| splurge a bunch of money to put it in your offices. You're
| just being ignorant at that point.
| warning26 wrote:
| Let's have a look the release dates of your list of
| surviving products, shall we?
|
| Gmail: 2004; Search: 1998; Drive: 2012; Photos: 2015;
| Chromecast: 2013; Chrome: 2008; Books: 2004; Flights: 2011;
| Scholar: 2004; AdSense: 2003; Calendar: 2006; Docs: 2006;
| Sheets: 2006; Keep: 2013; Translate: 2006; Maps: 2005
|
| What do those all have in common? The most recent one is 7
| years ago, and the others are older still. What else
| happened 7 years ago? Sundar became CEO. Google has not
| released a single successful product since he started --
| telling, isn't it?
| SquareWheel wrote:
| > Have you not seen killed by google ?
|
| Yes, we've all seen it. Honestly can we just discuss the
| tech for once instead of making the same comment 30 times
| on every Google thread?
|
| This sort of video streaming is reminiscent of the "tele-
| human" teleconferencing in Silicon Valley [1]. Hopefully it
| works better. It would be timed well as so many companies
| are looking at working from home right now. Though as with
| anything with "Project" in the name, I wouldn't expect any
| actual product for at least five years, and probably more.
|
| Salesforce makes sense as a partner. They have multiple
| global offices and could stress test things beyond internal
| dogfooding.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're
| going to splurge a bunch of money to put it in your
| offices. You're just being ignorant at that point.
|
| Companies don't kill things that have support contracts and
| enterprise agreements.
|
| Look at GSuite. What's been killed?
|
| Fuck even apple won't kill the orphaned MacBook Pro with
| touchbar for support contract reasons.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism_
|
| Knocks it out of consideration for me. Deploying these things
| zaps energy. I trust a start-up with that investment more
| than Google. Sure, with an SLA, I'd have assurances. But for
| the "let's throw a couple in some offices and home offices
| and see if it works" threshold, it seems like a time waste.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Meet is pretty dang solid_
|
| It's being whooped by Teams and Zoom, latecomers, in no small
| part because Google can't help but rename it every six
| months.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I believe enterprises choose those either because:
|
| (A) they've already bought into Office 365, so Teams being
| free to them makes it a no-brainer
|
| or (B) Zoom was the first big name during Covid, so
| companies that bought into it don't consider changing due
| to the friction that would cause.
|
| Pretty much every company I've interacted with over
| interviews and meetings who does use Google Workspace ends
| up using Meet as well, for the same reason enterprises
| using O365 as their user directory choose Teams (reason A
| above).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Sure. Nobody disputes Google's tech chops. It's the
| business side that's been perennially problematic. That
| applies to Starlight as much as it does to Meet.
| BlueTankEngine wrote:
| I apologize if this comes off as aggressive, but all four of
| your points are totally wrong and I am sick of seeing these
| ideas parroted all over HN.
|
| 1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things.
| IF you actually go through the list of all the "products"
| Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just
| consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack.
| Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital
| deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming
| space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it
| was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money,
| not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you
| prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life
| support like Amazon has done with Twitch?
|
| 2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via
| G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't
| mean they have no competency in the space.
|
| 3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace
| text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat
| is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet
| ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your
| talking points also were the ones criticizing google for
| attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was
| "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-
| bundled
|
| 4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for
| their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android
| ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible
| smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a
| decade.
|
| Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in
| your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google
| Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially
| making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't
| exist.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > 1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing
| things...95% of them are just consolidated into other areas
|
| Public opinion still stands, they now garner a reputation of
| "won't support for long, might kill" on new products they
| launch. You can't even trust their owns comma - a month out
| of Stadia being axed they were talking about how they were
| going to continue supporting it.
|
| > Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via
| G-Suite.
|
| Email and stuff, sure. Video conferencing, less so.
|
| > Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for
| their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android
| ecosystem
|
| Is this a joke? Their hardware support is lacking, and the
| fact that it's the "best of the Android ecosystem" says a lot
| about the quality of that sector. Basically every time this
| topic comes up on the pixel and Android subreddits, users who
| _have_ those phones bemoan googles lacking and inconsistent
| support.
| xani_ wrote:
| > Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate
| communication space. Teams and Zoom ate it's lunch.
|
| That really perplexes me. They had multiple both video and text
| chats. Their video chat was one of better ones even way before
| Zoom.
|
| All they need to do is stop making tech demos and make one app
| doing it. But they just make one sorta kinda decent one, throw
| it away, and make another one to replace it.
| ehmmmmmmmm wrote:
| Something 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?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Because there aren't enough qualified black people to hire, but
| that doesn't mean that black people don't exist.
|
| Look at some harrowing stats on who takes the AP CS exam:
| https://www.edweek.org/leadership/still-no-african-americans...
| ehmmmmmmmm wrote:
| Sure, but it also feels slightly pretentious. Is
| representation in PR what the community wants? Why not
| actually uplifting the community such that artifical
| representation isn't necessary?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Looks really interesting, and reminds me of the cool "Looking
| Glass" screens in the game Prey (2017) [0].
|
| [0] https://prey.fandom.com/wiki/Looking_Glass
| napolux wrote:
| as already pointed out... how can someone trust this (and any
| other non-core project) from google?
| nitrixion wrote:
| My perspective is that if it doesn't serve ads it likely
| doesn't have a future at Google.
|
| I would be interested in playing around with this tech, but I
| wouldn't integrate it into my business or any other part of my
| life.
| amf12 wrote:
| > My perspective is that if it doesn't serve ads it likely
| doesn't have a future at Google.
|
| It could be a product under Workspaces. Google Meet is widely
| used and with no advertisements.
| macrolime wrote:
| Hopefully it would support some peer-to-peer protocol so that
| when Google cancels it, it won't just stopping working.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| Let's start a bet. How long do you think it will take Google to
| shut it down?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| This is my favorite Google project. I hope it becomes something
| that we all can use. To me, at least, this is more useful than
| meeting in vr with no legs.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| My questions are:
|
| 1. Does it only support 1-on-1 meetings (the demos only show
| 1-1)? I think that's still useful, but note probably 90%+ of my
| online meetings have at least 3 people.
|
| 2. Sounds like the expense means it will only be installed in
| offices, not people's homes. Which, again, is still useful _as
| long as_ it hits the 3rd bullet point.
|
| 3. Does everyone need to be on a Starline device to
| participate? I'd expect/hope to get "graceful degredation" in
| functionality for folks who were just joining from, say, their
| laptop at home.
| a-dub wrote:
| > 2. Sounds like the expense means it will only be installed
| in offices, not people's homes. Which, again, is still useful
| as long as it hits the 3rd bullet point.
|
| honestly, with all the cool stuff coming out of computer
| vision these days, you might see something that can create a
| similar effect on your laptop in the not so distant future.
|
| high quality, single camera (realtime?) depth maps are a
| thing now.
|
| head tracking is easier to do now as well.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I mean, Meta showed off some pretty convincing Codec
| avatars at Meta connect[0], but the challenge there is that
| it requires pretty beefy machines to run and complex
| precisely-positioned cameras.
|
| 0: https://youtu.be/2mnonWbzOiQ
| andybak wrote:
| I think the legs thing is overblown. No legs is better than
| uncanny valley legs.
| jjcon wrote:
| Why do you need legs for conference calls? Also you can totally
| have legs in VR. Not only are there leg trackers but Meta has
| already announced they have worked out inferenced leg
| kinematics coming next year and other apps already have them
| (VRChat etc).
| twobitshifter wrote:
| To clarify, the presence of legs wouldn't make me prefer VR
| to this (a hologram that doesn't need a headset)
| bhaney wrote:
| Not a very high bar there
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The point being competitors are pouring billions into VR
| meetings, but this project at google is getting little
| attention.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Google R&D projects don't have the longevity reputation, so
| they might not deserve attention.
| alphabetting wrote:
| 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
| readams wrote:
| I've personally tried a prototype and it's actually pretty
| impressive. You get a fully-3D life-size person sitting across
| from you. The rendering is not 100% perfect, but it's close
| enough that you're not in any sort of uncanny valley. The main
| problem is that it's really a 1:1 thing.
| Ensydr wrote:
| Being in New Zealand I remember the google balloon project, what
| happened to that?
| jamesvnz wrote:
| My understanding is that it could be made to work, but Starlink
| came along and clearly solved the problem of delivering high
| speed internet to remote areas better.
| vl wrote:
| It flew away into stratosphere.
| Ensydr wrote:
| hahahaha
| codyogden wrote:
| Project Loon was killed last year.
| account-5 wrote:
| I have definitely been wrong about technology before, prime
| example was camera phones when the first appeared; couldn't for
| the life of me see the point.
|
| With that caveat, I don't get how this makes
| employees/customers/clients more engaged/productive or form
| rapport/have better experiences.
|
| Like the Facebook thing I'm definitely not using anything that
| has to be this massively invasive (eye tracking, facial
| recognition, etc) from an advert company.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The desire to connect across distance is very real.
| Grandparents want to see their grandkids, customers want to see
| their vendors, friends want to see each other.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Indeed. And the market has a lot of products that already
| attempt to address that. Aside from being physically bigger
| and therefore more expensive, what is the value-add to this
| for those scenarios?
|
| We'd all love a 65" window to stay in touch with loved ones,
| but the price is the problem not the tech. This doesn't
| attempt to address the economics, and to be honest I'm not
| sure what is new or interesting about Starline?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| It's not just a screen, it projects different images to
| your eyeballs to give the illusion of depth.
| bibabaloo wrote:
| Wonder how the folks at https://tonari.no/ feel about this.
| pedalpete wrote:
| They should feel pretty great about this.
|
| Google is making the market. Will Google eventually build a
| real product in this market? Possibly, but it is possible to
| compete with Google.
|
| Do they have differentiator against Google? Maybe, I don't know
| the space, but it's probably a positive for them more than a
| negative.
| heliostatic wrote:
| I had the same thought--tonari seems to be doing fantastic work
| in this space. I hope this proves a market for them and
| accelerates interest.
| buildbot wrote:
| 1. 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 decreased latency and ability to both talk
| at once. Solve this, and you solve 90% of the problem, imo
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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...
| jefftk wrote:
| 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...
| busymom0 wrote:
| The best first thing that came to my mind when reading this was
| that users won't trust it to last long and Google will kill it
| soon enough. Seems like most users on HN share the same feelings
| too. Google seems to have destroyed their reputation with such
| behaviour.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| What's even the point? It's just going to be dead in three years.
| jnwatson wrote:
| If this were from a startup, no one would be saying the same,
| but because it is Google, folks want to ride the bandwagon.
|
| Microsoft has cancelled thousands of products, but nobody says
| a thing.
|
| Yet the number of hardware products Google has cancelled you
| can count on 1 hand.
| binkHN wrote:
| This reminds me of Cisco's Telepresence. Anyone know how this is
| different?
| binkHN wrote:
| I think I just answered my own question via
| https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/. It
| appears some kind of "3D display" is being used.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-12 23:00 UTC)