For the past few years, Google has been developing 3D video technology that would allow distant colleagues, friends or family 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.
As with Starline, Google has taken the wraps off the Beam platform at its annual developer conference. The concept remains about the same, but the technology has evolved to the point of market readiness.
Essentially, the idea is that a user would face a large screen with a bunch of cameras capturing different angles and tracking head movement "down to the millimeter" at 60 frames per second. The person on the other end of the chat is sat in front of the same kind of setup.
With the help of AI and light-field displays, the normally two-dimensional video feed is given more depth for "realistic 3D experiences" without needing to wear immersive headsets or special glasses. Each chat participant appears full-size, Google says that the system's head-tracking chops are near perfect, and promises "a much more natural and deeply immersive conversational experience."
Google is looking to get Beam units into the offices of early business customers – which could include the likes of Deloitte, Salesforce, Citadel, NEC and Duolingo – later this year, thanks to a partnership with HP announced earlier in the month. The plan is to have it work with familiar videoconferencing services like Google Meet and Zoom – you can see a preview of speech translation using Beam in the video below.
This matured technology would likely have been quite useful for many a corporate machine during the recent pandemic, but it was still very much in the lab back then. Remote workers are now returning to office life, so there may no longer be such a vital need for this kind of technology. But given the likely high price of early admission to this platform, it may be restricted to folks in very senior management positions who want to meet with their peers around the globe without having to jetset. Though we have seen similar ideas employed in education or to bring doctors closer to remote patients, so perhaps the technologies will trickle down to workers at the coal face at some point.
HP will showcase the platform at InfoComm next month, ahead of delivery to select customers later in the year. Google is also working with "key channel partners" like Diversified and AVI-SPL to bring the Beam platform to businesses worldwide. It seems the "3D video chat portal of the future" could be just around the corner.
Source: Google
