Google's Project Starline has been in the works for the last few years and is now heading out commercially as Google Beam and it’s Google’s way to make virtual meetings suck less. Beam uses a light field display and six cameras to render a volumetric, real-time 3D version of the person on the other end of a videocall. There’s no headset, no weird glasses. Just a chunky display, a Chrome OS-powered compute puck the size of a DVD player, and a bespoke AI model working with Google Cloud in the background to stitch it all together. The Verge’s Alex Heath got an exclusive hands-on.
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00:00Even though it's not my first time seeing this demo, I'm still blown away by it every time.
00:04God, this is still freaky even after doing it before. Every time.
00:08It starts like...
00:09This is Google Beam, formerly known as Project Starline.
00:12It's Google's answer to mundane 2D meetings, and you're about to start seeing it out in the real world.
00:18Google has been working on this for a long time, but what Google is finally getting ready to ship as Google Beam,
00:24I think has the chance to really change how people do meetings in the office.
00:30When you're using Beam, the best part of it is that you don't have to wear anything.
00:35It's not like AR glasses or VR headsets.
00:38It's just a giant TV with a bunch of custom cameras and sensors that Google has developed.
00:43And the end experience is that you're looking at a 3D hologram of someone.
00:49It's not a hologram, but it appears to be.
00:51It's almost like a holodeck or something. It feels futuristic.
00:56And ultimately, you feel like you're there with the person, even though you're not.
01:00It's a hard thing to describe when you're not seeing it, but it's very powerful.
01:05Google helped us get some of this footage to at least show a little bit of what this is like.
01:09Again, you're never going to get the full experience without being fully present and in it being yourself.
01:14But I do think you're able to see this depth and the 3D of it all.
01:19It's just very unique and it's very hard to capture, but we did our best.
01:24The thing that really sticks with me about Google Beam is that it has this sense of presence that you just cannot get unless you're with someone physically.
01:33It's like it's Uncanny Valley-esque, like, and then the longer you look at it, the more present you feel.
01:40But initially, it's almost like the opposite of presence. It's like, this is tricking me.
01:45When I did this Beam demo, I picked up on a lot of stuff that I would have never picked up through a laptop.
01:51You know, the way that the hands move, the tilt of the head, the eyes looking off to the side.
01:57There's a richness to it, I guess, that you don't get from any other kind of conferencing software.
02:05I don't know. It makes you want to stay in a meeting longer, which is like a weird thing to say.
02:09But it doesn't drain you like normal virtual meetings.
02:15And that's actually something that Google has found in its testing of this over the years, is that people who try it report that they have less meeting fatigue.
02:24The thing we weren't actually able to film is the final device of Beam that is shipping to the public with HP later this year.
02:31It's going to start showing up in offices at Salesforce, Deloitte, and other companies that Google and HP are working with.
02:38This design with HP is smaller. It's nowhere near as big as some of these early research prototypes we saw before Google was able to shrink a lot of the compute down.
02:49They're doing most of this in the cloud now with a proprietary AI model they developed that creates this 3D experience.
02:57Google is not telling us pricing yet.
02:59That's going to be coming out very soon with HP, but I was able to get out that it's going to be priced very comparatively to the existing virtual conferencing setups that are in offices today.
03:10So this is something that's not, you know, exorbitantly expensive like it was when Google was first developing it.
03:15They've really shrunk the tech down, and they think it's finally something that they can commercialize at scale.
03:20So I'm lucky that I've tried this before when it was Project Starline.
03:24And Viren, behind me, though, today was his first time trying this, and he got to see the full thing.
03:30And it was really fun to see his face the moment he sat down because it reminded me of my first demo, which is just, you kind of go, holy shit, like, this is real.
03:39Like, it feels real even though it's not.
03:41And it's something that you only experience the first time, but it's pretty cool when you do.
03:47In the wild.
03:48That's insane.
03:49Literally, the first time I did it, I was like, this is like, what?
03:55What?