Video Calling

A few years ago, Google showed off its Project Starline tech that would make you look like a 3D hologram on a video call for a more connected experience. It's now called Google Beam, and you can pick up the gear from HP for the princely sum of US$25,000.

For the last few years, Google has been developing 3D video technology that would allow distant colleagues to chat as though they were in the same room. Now the tech giant has rebranded Project Starline to Google Beam to prepare for commercial rollout.

Most laptops and Macbooks come with a webcam built in, but they can leave video-chatters somewhat wanting in terms of performance and image quality. Newcomer Opal Camera has addressed such things with a small-but-powerful model called the Tadpole.

Video chats came into their own during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing an audiovisual lifeline for fragmented families and remote colleagues in touch. But they seem rather flat compared to Project Ghost presented by Logitech at ISE 2023 this week.

New research is offering some of the first empirical evidence of the fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings. The research is part of an increasing body of study into the effects of remote work and the phenomenon known as "Zoom Fatigue."

We've already had plenty of announcements from the Google I/O 2021 developer event happening this week, but Google has also been showing off a 3D video conferencing app that it's working on called Project Starline.

Since many of us can no longer have face-to-face chats with family and friends, we've turned to online video meetups. Google is opening up its Meet video conferencing portal to everyone with a Google account for free.

Plain old video calls could soon be made to look very outdated, thanks to new research coming out of Queen's University in Ontario. A team there has produced a 3D teleconferencing system called TeleHuman 2, which enables real-time holograms of people to appear in any location.

Facebook Messenger's instant messaging, group chat, video call and SMS support features have helped make it one of the most popular messaging apps. Now, there's yet another reason to use it, with Group Video Chat in Messenger making it possible talk face-to-face with multiple people at once.

A new device called Loop is out to make it easier to share content and video chat with friends and family.

​Video calling has huge potential, but no one has perfected the formula yet. Google revealed its answer to natural, reliable, universal video messaging at Google IO in May, and has now followed up with the release of the Duo one-to-one video calling app.​​

If you were geared up about that Skype Translator preview that Microsoft announced a year ago, but weren't able to get into the closed preview, today is your lucky day.