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A YouTuber published the best look yet at Google's secretive 'magic window' that makes video meetings feel more like the real thing — check it out

May 19, 2023, 19:20 IST
Business Insider
Google unveiled its new prototype device this month for 3D video calls.Google.
  • YouTuber Marques Brownlee filmed what it's like to use Google's 3D video chat device.
  • Google unveiled the tech, dubbed "Project Starline," back in 2021 with pictures showing the "magic window" for meetings.
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YouTuber Marques Brownlee sits at an office desk in front of what looks like a large TV screen.

As he pulls up his chair to get closer, the 65-inch screen before him brightens and appears to transform into something like a booth, where the person he's there to meet has materialized.

"It looks like you could drop something on this table, right here," Brownlee remarks to his virtual companion, Andrew Nartker, the general manager for Google's "Project Starline," its cutting-edge video chat technology.

The video by Brownlee actually shows what it's like to use the technology — Google has previously shown images and animations.

"We're meant to feel like this room is just one room, instead of two separate locations," Nartker says to Brownlee in the video. "This is something we think is the glimpse of what communication could look like in the next few years."

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The device Brownlee is using is adorned around with lights, speakers, and cameras that can capture a speaker's voice and appearance so that they can be rendered in 3D to the person on the other side. The technology combines the sleek-looking hardware with artificial intelligence to help recreate the speaker and their surroundings, Brownlee said.

"The magic of this is twofold — it's the display and the computing happening," he said in the video.

Google revealed plans for such a product back in 2021 at its annual I/O conference that year, about a year into the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that gave rise to a new dawn of remote meetings.

The company said this month that it has a newer prototype model with a more compact design, which is seen in Brownlee's demonstration.

"So for our latest prototype, we developed new AI techniques that only require a few standard cameras to produce higher quality, lifelike 3D images," Nartker wrote in the company's blog post.

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"Thanks to these advancements, our prototype now resembles a more traditional video conferencing system — going from the size of a restaurant booth to a flat-screen TV —that's more deployable and accessible," he wrote.

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