How 3D tech may end awful video calls
Have you ever caught yourself almost nodding off during an online meeting? Or perhaps you’ve been caught doing something else — say, idly scrolling through a shopping site while someone droned on about quarterly targets?
I wouldn’t recommend you do these things, but you could be forgiven if you had. Online meetings are awful, a sort of karmic punishment for the many upsides of remote work.
Alas, as millions of Canadians with white collar jobs have shifted to working from home or doing hybrid work, the Zoom meeting has become an unfortunate and unavoidable part of life.
But a recent sneak peek at some new technology from Google suggests that online meetings may be about to get better. The secret to the tech, though, isn’t goggles or cartoon avatars or anything else, but instead, making you feel like you aren’t online at all. What is suggests is that the way forward for remote meetings is likely something rooted in making things feel more human and more real.
Google’s tech is called Project Starline, and for now it’s just a prototype. Essentially a sophisticated form of 3D video conferencing, it actually started out in 2021 as a large booth you would enter that contained a screen and an array of many cameras.
Now, as recently showcased by popular tech personality Marques Brownlee, the tech has been shrunken down to what looks like a large-screen TV surrounded by cameras. It’s now smaller because it relies on AI tech to create a 3D image of the person sitting in front of the screen mostly using regular cameras.
The point is that it is meant to make a video call with another person feel much more like an in-person chat than an exhausting Zoom meeting.
As described by Brownlee, it isn’t quite a hologram or like a 3D movie, but something in between.
The end result according to those how have used it, however, is impressive: that you feel as if you are looking at a 3D person rather than a flat image.
It’s a small difference, but an important one. As the Star’s Kevin Jiang wrote recently, Zoom fatigue — the draining feeling of trying to maintain attention in an online meeting — stems from the fact the cues we use to connect with other people are largely gone in a Zoom call.
Google’s Project Starline seems a step closer to fixing those issues because the tech tracks movements, making one’s image appear 3D, while also letting you look straight ahead instead of up or down at a camera.
What that actually amounts to is making a virtual meeting feel far like a real one.
Google is not alone in this attempt to solve the problem. Other companies are working on similar tech, while competitors like Meta are investing heavily into virtual reality tech and the metaverse.
The problem people are trying to solve for is what has started to be called “presence”: the feeling of being there when “there” is in fact virtual.
When we tune out of a Zoom meeting we do so largely because, in appearance, it isn’t any different from a YouTube video or another form of media. It’s not just that we don’t achieve presence; it’s that we are barely even present.
Meeting tech, in order for it to actually get better, needs to somehow put people in each others’ spaces — that is, rather than a voice and a small box on your laptop screen, one needs to feel as if one is actually talking to another person.
Whether or not Google’s tech becomes mainstream will depend on how it actually plays out in practice, not to mention cost. It seems likely that for now it will be quite an expensive proposition, even if the tech has been considerably simplified.
Yet, as with all things, there are potential downsides. In making online meetings even more real and present, in an era of remote work we are also asking people into our homes and our spaces in a more intimate way.
There is also the yet-to-be-seen benefits of these kinds of meetings. Early reports suggest they feel more immediate, but whether that translates into productivity benefits is unclear.
But the transition to remote work was largely done under the duress of a global pandemic. What resulted was a cobbled-together mishmash of things: Zoom, Slack, Teams, all of it the product of an earlier era.
Yet if remote work isn’t simply a blip but is instead increasingly a norm, what will be necessary is exactly what Google is trying here.
No, there won’t really ever be a substitute for in-person connection. But as being apart becomes the default, the least we can do is to try and make things a little more human.