How much would you pay? I expect the lower end to be around $20,000 from hardware alone, plus at least gigabit down/up connectivity.
Many ordinary folk already have 4k TVs at home and 8k will probably become commonplace in the future. The real bottleneck will be good low-latency broadband both up and down, but fibre to the home should make that easier. I wonder if ISPs in the future will offer QoS guarantees to enable really good videoconferencing?
I mean, Zoom, Meet et al are much better than video conferencing solutions like Webex even from a few years ago, but it's hilarious how much drama there still is around video calls. "oh, sorry, I didn't realise I had muted myself", "can you hear me...?", "I think we just lost Steve", and so on. I'll be glad to see all of that just go away.
You can't do weird texture mapping or lossy compression and expect people to really seem like they are there. Even if you don't notice that stuff normally watching a video, I think you'll notice it when you're interacting like someone is really in front of you, and that will throw off the immersion.
1: https://www.quora.com/In-regards-to-filesize-how-big-is-1-mi...
That said, my intuition is they aren't doing a pure video encoding solution. The fact that they talk about 3d modeling leads me to believe they are doing a combination of model + texture to get the realistic results. That would significantly decrease the amount of bandwidth and computational power needed. Over a low bandwidth situation you'd simply need to send model updates and do some smart interpolation to determine what things should look like.
Similar to the concept that playing a 3d game requires MB of resources but recording the same game at 8k would require a boatload more memory.
My assumption is they are using LIDAR to get a good model, high quality cameras to texture things, and a nice AI to stitch things together and interpolate when data isn't arriving fast enough.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/10/05/gan-video-conferenc...
https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-...
https://aibots.my/officialBlog/deepminds-ai-agent-muzero-cou...
I have 300/100mbs connection which costs 20 euros in month.
$20,000 is a bit out of the reach of most people, and reserves this for business use or desperate need.
I could see a bunch of execs getting this installed in their home offices as a company perk, and then using it for personal reasons too.
Even for business use a price with 5 digits would make it confined to a few executive offices.