Project Starline expands testing through an early access program | Hacker News Reader

Project Starline expands testing through an early access program

blog.google

125 pointscpeterso137 comments

I had forgotten about this. Discussion from last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199330

If they've managed to embed the video collector at eye height or close, so the effect of looking at the screen is to be seen as looking at the other person, this is in itself useful. If it's still a non-eyeline camera and they do some adaptive smarts to make it "look" like eyeline I'd be interested how good that is.

If they have leveraged peppers ghost and like techniques to make a volume appear to be "occupied" then it's possible this also helps with hinting to presence. I've seen some art displays which sort-of did this. It was remarkably pleasant to sit opposite people who you sort-of knew were not actually in the implied volume behind the screen.

The influence of delay on perception of "there-ness" is huge. I would be interested how good this is at adjusting for unremovable lightspeed delay inter-continental. Not to over do it, it wouldn't surprise me if this works in SFO to NYC but works less well SFO to LHR or SFO to SIN.

I tend to assume "applied ML" is marketing speak but its possible the investment in time to tune some net has made an FPGA cheap to deploy to do one job, and do it well, and over time be (re)tuned to do it better. This isn't welcome to new robot overlords, its just sensible use of technology to improve.

I could see anything which does image processing like this also be applicable for people with persisting tic or tremor issues. It might help with stabilising image for their remote participation in online stuff.

I totally prefer this kind of application of smarts, to what Meta are doing.

FaceTime does auto gaze correction.

The experience is as if you're looking directly at a person sitting across from you. There is no camera offset.

The Q is "done how"

IIRC depth sensors, you're not actually looking at the original image from a camera, they recreate the person as a 3D model.

It would be rad if the camera was mounted behind the screen on a track that could move it to wherever the viewers eyes are

they likely never reached the precision and leverage needed for this position, I'd not be surprised if everything that is left is just digging through snow and figuring out how many a particular java class takes in terms of bytes.

I've personally tried a prototype and it's actually pretty impressive. You get a fully-3D life-size person sitting across from you. The rendering is not 100% perfect, but it's close enough that you're not in any sort of uncanny valley. The main problem is that it's really a 1:1 thing.

Did you use it at home or in an office? The emphasis of hybrid work makes it seem like this is primarily for offices.

This is my favorite Google project. I hope it becomes something that we all can use. To me, at least, this is more useful than meeting in vr with no legs.

Not a very high bar there

The point being competitors are pouring billions into VR meetings, but this project at google is getting little attention.

Google R&D projects don't have the longevity reputation, so they might not deserve attention.

Google AI R&D projects seem to do well. The transformer which Google AI released is the basis of a lot of modern ML projects

My questions are:

1. Does it only support 1-on-1 meetings (the demos only show 1-1)? I think that's still useful, but note probably 90%+ of my online meetings have at least 3 people.

2. Sounds like the expense means it will only be installed in offices, not people's homes. Which, again, is still useful as long as it hits the 3rd bullet point.

3. Does everyone need to be on a Starline device to participate? I'd expect/hope to get "graceful degredation" in functionality for folks who were just joining from, say, their laptop at home.

> 2. Sounds like the expense means it will only be installed in offices, not people's homes. Which, again, is still useful as long as it hits the 3rd bullet point.

honestly, with all the cool stuff coming out of computer vision these days, you might see something that can create a similar effect on your laptop in the not so distant future.

high quality, single camera (realtime?) depth maps are a thing now.

head tracking is easier to do now as well.

I mean, Meta showed off some pretty convincing Codec avatars at Meta connect[0], but the challenge there is that it requires pretty beefy machines to run and complex precisely-positioned cameras.

0: https://youtu.be/2mnonWbzOiQ

I think the legs thing is overblown. No legs is better than uncanny valley legs.

No legs was just a symbol for how bad the whole thing is in general:

- "Metaverse" of 2022, https://twitter.com/shiringhaffary/status/157989246831667609...

- Playstation Home of 2007, https://twitter.com/CaseyTheVA/status/1579936236122185728

Bad visually? Or bad in terms of user-experience?

Or in terms of overall utility? For whom?

VRChat and RecRoom both are arguably "metaverses" (although we just called it "social VR" pre-hype) and have pretty healthy usage numbers. The latter is more of a games hub but all these apps are a mix of different use-cases so not a clear distinction. (Consider Fortnite which is now social but was originally just a multiplayer game)

There's a debate to be had about aesthetics - some of that boils down to taste. But you can't argue that all social VR apps are useless.

EDIT - wording tweaks

> But you can't argue that all social VR apps are useless.

I'm not arguing that.

I think I pretty clearly stated what I meant. Everything else is you arguing with someone else.

You said:

> No legs was just a symbol for how bad the whole thing is in general:

That isn't terribly clear to me at all. "How bad" in what way? What is "the whole thing"? The links you provided are comparing two apps. I presume you prefer one to the other. I'm guessing the reason is visual..? But I'm not sure.

I was actually hoping for some more clarity from you.

Why do you need legs for conference calls? Also you can totally have legs in VR. Not only are there leg trackers but Meta has already announced they have worked out inferenced leg kinematics coming next year and other apps already have them (VRChat etc).

To clarify, the presence of legs wouldn’t make me prefer VR to this (a hologram that doesn’t need a headset)

I need to know if you are also not wearing pants

Definitely more interesting than VR. Or at least, more obviously useful within the next decade than a possible future VR revolution in meetings.

If this is successful I'm guessing it can be scaled down to a home setting. It would bring an excuse to buy that huge screen for a home office.

Wonder how the folks at https://tonari.no/ feel about this.

I had the same thought--tonari seems to be doing fantastic work in this space. I hope this proves a market for them and accelerates interest.

They should feel pretty great about this.

Google is making the market. Will Google eventually build a real product in this market? Possibly, but it is possible to compete with Google.

Do they have differentiator against Google? Maybe, I don't know the space, but it's probably a positive for them more than a negative.

If I was writing short term sci-fi, I'd have Starbucks, or some such chain with omnipresence, have bookable meeting rooms with technology like that, so that we can go and have quality meetings across the world at affordable prices.

I'm struggling to believe Google will see this through beyond a tech demo. And who's the target audience? I mean, what would a unit's cost be? Looks like another cool tech Google won't be able to productize successfully.

Edit: I was super excited for Soli way back when, but so far haven't see any smart clothes they were imagining in the early days.

Soli did seem cool. Wasn't Jacquard the smart clothing technology? Surprisingly, I think there are some products: https://atap.google.com/jacquard/products/

I couldn't find either jackets for sale (broken links), and the promo videos were rather underwhelming. Seems like a smart watch can already do all of these, albeit in a less "cool" manner, and it's not tied to a piece of clothing. I was imagining something more cyberpunk, and not just an input device. Perhaps, that goes beyond what Soli tries to achieve.

Edit: I can imagine more interesting use cases where you can't use precise input, for example when wearing gloves (construction, space suite, etc.).

Nest is doing some cool stuff with Soli on their hubs to monitor sleep patterns: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-nest-hub-soli-motion

Disclosure: I work on Fuchsia which is now the OS for some of the Nest hubs (https://9to5google.com/2022/06/23/google-fuchsia-nest-hub-ma...)

Can I say that a Magic Window in my office sounds 1000x better than a magic headset that I have to wear (Meta Quest 2)

It does. And so does a hologram. But it remains to be seen if Google can see a tech demo through, make a profitable product, and support it past the initial hype. I hope this time it does, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Who cares? Why is every comment in this thread about how they hate google ventures? Can’t we discuss the idea itself?

> Why is every comment in this thread about how they hate google ventures?

Because every products they make that isn't collecting data to build their advertising profiles or display ads ends up in the graveyard after a few months/years

Google doesn’t have to be the one to build the magic window. It could be one of us here.

Let’s discuss the merits of the idea, not Google’s reputation.

Then maybe go and copy it in an environment where it won’t get killed by a corporate overlord

I think you'd see this with some c-suites types or VCs who have money to throw around and possibly designers who want to give better sense of prototypes to colleagues from afar

One audience may be courts. A great deal of time, effort, and money goes into high-quality telepresence (at least in my area) for offenders who cannot attend court (due to COVID, the nature of their offense, etc).

As other commenters have mentioned in this thread, there are lots of unconscious (and fully conscious) biases against interaction over video conference, and a key function of the courts is to eliminate bias from the judicial system.

This, obviously, is much less "sexy" than slick co-working and corporate spaces, so Google doesn't advertise it; but I would be surprised if courts weren't one of the early adopters if this technology becomes commercially viable.

> A great deal of time, effort, and money goes into high-quality telepresence (at least in my area) for offenders who cannot attend court (due to COVID, the nature of their offense, etc).

Interestingly this is the exact opposite of what I've heard: Prisoners are sat in front of low-quality cameras that barely work on a good day, and have a hard time comprehending what's said and being comprehended. "Luckily", that's usually not necessarily in our current system.

If you're comfortable do you mind sharing what court you're talking about?

I've done a fair bit of work in various courts, prisons, and police stations in NSW (Australia). All (where remote court hearings are performed) have pretty professional Webex setups for dialing in, and there are projects underway to improve this further with dedicated studio booths with active and passive noise cancellation.

It's possible that NSW is the anomaly here, but I suspect that it holds true at least Australia wide, and in some areas abroad.

Whoops, I assumed that America is the default again.

On the bottom of the video clips, it says: "Not authorized by FCC rules. No sales or leases permitted until authorized."

What is that about? I've never seen it before, and I've seen a lot of stuff. Are they required to print that by some rule I'm unfamiliar with?

Before electronics can be sold in the US, the go through testing to prove it doesn't create electromagnetic interference. Those rules are set by the FCC. Some uses (e.g. R&D prototypes) are exempted. This is Google's legal team covering their asses by making it clear these are prototypes.

There's every reason to assume these will pass the tests, but there's no reason to do so until you have the hardware pretty locked down.

Yeah but if they're not currently for sale, and there's no pre-order button, then no need for a disclaimer?

Why would you have to disclaim things that you aren't taking orders for? Hobby projects, prototypes, etc?

Because when you are Google-scale you have a big legal department whose job is to make sure that people obey the laws like this. I'm sure if it was a garage startup, no disclaimer would be there. But Google wants to make sure that they are protected by making it clear no employee can loan it to a friend, etc. And there are rules set up so when that label is no longer applied, then the appropriate people have signed off on it.

Ah. Thanks for taking the time to explain :)

This makes all of the interactions look like interrogations. What am I missing?

Same here, my first thought was that it looks like a prison visitation.

Genius. Sell this to prisons.

Perfect for corporate 1:1s then.

It's not unlike documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's "Interrotron":

> An Interrotron is a clever film making device used to create up-close, face-to-face interviews. The Interrotron makes it simple to create in-your-face, gritty interviews. It’s this eye-catching style that never fails to engage an audience.

https://telepromptermirror.com/errol-morris-interrotron/

This is amazing and would do wonders for adult entertainment as well.

1. Echoing all the comments here, can’t see google keeping this around for 5+ years

2. I feel like the main thing holding back a normal video meeting or even voice call is latency - latency leads to the awkward pauses or interruptions that for me cause the most “connection friction”. If anyone here has talked on an actual landline recently, it feels qualitatively better than a teams voice call for example due to the decreased latency and ability to both talk at once. Solve this, and you solve 90% of the problem, imo

I think there has been some research suggesting that lack of eye contact (the camera is not where the person's face is) has a really large unconcious affect on how people interact.

Apple fixed this[0] but I don’t personally use FaceTime much so I’d be interested to see if people find it creepy or better.

0: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/how-to-use-eye-cont...

Latency isn't actually that hard to fix: if both connections are wired (both internet and headphones / speakers) you can get round trip latency down to about 15ms which is good enough to feel immediate and on par with POTS.

It's just a matter of getting your coworkers onto ethernet, and convincing them to give up their Bluetooth headphones...

> you can get round trip latency down to about 15ms

(...if everyone is within about 1000 miles).

True! Light at 5ms per 1k miles (each way) sets a hard limit on latency.

I have definitely been wrong about technology before, prime example was camera phones when the first appeared; couldn't for the life of me see the point.

With that caveat, I don't get how this makes employees/customers/clients more engaged/productive or form rapport/have better experiences.

Like the Facebook thing I'm definitely not using anything that has to be this massively invasive (eye tracking, facial recognition, etc) from an advert company.

The desire to connect across distance is very real. Grandparents want to see their grandkids, customers want to see their vendors, friends want to see each other.

Indeed. And the market has a lot of products that already attempt to address that. Aside from being physically bigger and therefore more expensive, what is the value-add to this for those scenarios?

We'd all love a 65" window to stay in touch with loved ones, but the price is the problem not the tech. This doesn't attempt to address the economics, and to be honest I'm not sure what is new or interesting about Starline?

It’s not just a screen, it projects different images to your eyeballs to give the illusion of depth.

So it is a screen you have to sit in an exact arch and that costs yet even more.

No, the eyeball tracking means you can move around and get the depth perception as you move. It seems like potentially very cool technology, I don’t understand this negativity.

I hope I get to try this at a WeWork sometime soon.

Looks really interesting, and reminds me of the cool “Looking Glass” screens in the game Prey (2017) [0].

[0] https://prey.fandom.com/wiki/Looking_Glass

Will they let people wfh after this? My guess is yes and with every bit of information tracked - what apparel people like to what kind people you like for match making. May be even what people are afraid of.

This reminds me of Cisco's Telepresence. Anyone know how this is different?

I think I just answered my own question via https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/. It appears some kind of “3D display” is being used.

This is sad because this is a brilliant enterprise product from a company that has few of the fundamentals required to sell it into the enterprise.

They sell Google Workspace pretty well.

Looks cool, but sad to see this is US only. I wonder if this is because regulations, latency requirements, or both?

Most of the comments here are just complaining Google is going to cancel this, but I think Google should cancel this because it doesn't seem like a good product.

They're not a hardware company and no matter how many people want a cool telepresence box, how many of those people want to pay Google employee prices for its maintenance?

It seems like they came up with it for fun, but maybe they should just sell it to Cisco.

Based on the comments here, the heavy lifting is done in software. If it takes off, I fully expect Google to start licensing it out the way they do much of their hardware (Chromebooks, Android, etc).

Chromebook and Android are general-purpose computers that can be used to go on the internet so you can see an ad.

This appears to be a way of doing especially immersive video calls; I'm not sure what the ecosystem for it is, unless you believe in metaverses.

i love how all the people in the demo videos are excessively and unnaturally expressive in order to show off how it captures depth.

would be neat to try, would be curious how much the effect holds up over time (vs flat video conferencing) as people get used to it.

interesting technology regardless.

20 bucks this will end up in google graveyard cemetery

good tech though this is way more impressive, now all we need is some other company who will commit to it unlike google

Can it reskin me as Tom Cruise?

I expect this will be shut down a year after the people working on it get their promos.

Being in New Zealand I remember the google balloon project, what happened to that?

Project Loon was killed last year.

It flew away into stratosphere.

hahahaha

My understanding is that it could be made to work, but Starlink came along and clearly solved the problem of delivering high speed internet to remote areas better.

Loon was shut down, but some of the technology is being elsewhere. (not surprising, this is how a lot of r&d projects go)

Some of the laser communication link tech is being used in project taara.

The cards are definitely stacked against this when it's at Google. Because of:

1. Google's solid track record of killing things because they didn't grow quickly, after a half hearted effort. Stadia being the latest example.

2. Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate its lunch.

3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Duo, Alo, ... already it's weird where this fits.

4. Google being bad at supporting new hardware gadgets. My Daydream VR came out 2 years before my Pixel, somehow these two things don't support each other.

I wish they at least would sell their divisions instead of kill/hamper such moonshot products. This looks like the next Google Glass.

It's a super fun thing to be the first person to comment about #1 on literally everything Google does, but it's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism.

For every product Google kills, it's launched dozens of wildly successful products you've been taking for granted for over a decade in some cases: Gmail, search, Drive, Photos, Chromecast, Chrome, Books, Flights, Scholar, AdSense, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Translate, Maps...

Google can and does support dozens of good products, and pretending otherwise is getting tiresome. If your best criticism is, "I dunno if Google will support this long term" that, to me, means you couldn't come up with anything better to say, which means it's a pretty damn cool product.

thank you. it's the definition of a middlebrow dismissal

> For every product Google kills, it's launched dozens of wildly successful products you've been taking for granted for over a decade in some cases: Gmail, search, Drive, Photos, Chromecast, Chrome, Books, Flights, Scholar, AdSense, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Keep, Translate, Maps...

More like for every 10 products they kill they maybe let one live... Have you not seen killed by google ?

> Google can and does support dozens of good products, and pretending otherwise is getting tiresome. If your best criticism is, "I dunno if Google will support this long term" that, to me, means you couldn't come up with anything better to say, which means it's a pretty damn cool product.

It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're going to splurge a bunch of money to put it in your offices. You're just being ignorant at that point.

> It's pretty fucking important to know that if you're going to splurge a bunch of money to put it in your offices. You're just being ignorant at that point.

Companies don’t kill things that have support contracts and enterprise agreements.

Look at GSuite. What’s been killed?

Fuck even apple won’t kill the orphaned MacBook Pro with touchbar for support contract reasons.

Back when I used gsuite at work they broke the old chat program. A few years later they obfuscated the hell out of the "accept/comment on calendar invite" flow.

Also, they are in the process of discontining the free tier.

Most damningly for me, they screwed up and eventually killed grand central (voip, call forwarding, voicemail) post acquisition.

> Have you not seen killed by google ?

Yes, we've all seen it. Honestly can we just discuss the tech for once instead of making the same comment 30 times on every Google thread?

This sort of video streaming is reminiscent of the "tele-human" teleconferencing in Silicon Valley [1]. Hopefully it works better. It would be timed well as so many companies are looking at working from home right now. Though as with anything with "Project" in the name, I wouldn't expect any actual product for at least five years, and probably more.

Salesforce makes sense as a partner. They have multiple global offices and could stress test things beyond internal dogfooding.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

I’m not sure tech for tech’s sake is a good value proposition. If they were to kill this off in the year what impact did it have on the world?

Likely very little. But wouldn't that be true of any technology? That doesn't seem like a good metric for determining how much potential impact a technology actually has.

I do agree about technology for technology's sake, but even in cases where the application is wrong, technologies are often repurposed. Viagra was created to treat heart disease.

For the tech to succeed they need to sell to enterprises, scale manufacturing, and be making the right bet on the future of work

In my opinion google has the wrong instincts on all 3.

This is not really a tool for hybrid work (it’s too expensive to deploy in homes) it’s a tool for communicating between offices.

Google is betting on everyone being back in the office at some point.

Let's have a look the release dates of your list of surviving products, shall we?

Gmail: 2004; Search: 1998; Drive: 2012; Photos: 2015; Chromecast: 2013; Chrome: 2008; Books: 2004; Flights: 2011; Scholar: 2004; AdSense: 2003; Calendar: 2006; Docs: 2006; Sheets: 2006; Keep: 2013; Translate: 2006; Maps: 2005

What do those all have in common? The most recent one is 7 years ago, and the others are older still. What else happened 7 years ago? Sundar became CEO. Google has not released a single successful product since he started -- telling, isn't it?

> Have you not seen killed by google ?

How could one not see it, when it's spammed multiple times in any Google product announcement thread on HN? But the thing is, that site doesn't actually tell you much for two reasons.

First, the list is just crap. Here's an exercise: pick 10 random items from that list. Had you ever heard of that product, do you think it had any users? Is "killed by google"'s categorization of something having been discontinued actually legit? Was the thing they're claiming as a product even one in the first place?

Second, it doesn't actually tell us whether this level of discontinued things is actually uncommon. Do the same exercise with the same inclusion criteria on the peer companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and I bet the lists will be comparable.

> it's silly and wrong to think that's a valid criticism

Knocks it out of consideration for me. Deploying these things zaps energy. I trust a start-up with that investment more than Google. Sure, with an SLA, I’d have assurances. But for the “let’s throw a couple in some offices and home offices and see if it works” threshold, it seems like a time waste.

Meet is pretty dang solid, and is pretty much exclusively used for “work” or anything related to a calendar invite. The rest of their video chat seems to be reserved for P2P/personal communications.

> Meet is pretty dang solid

It’s being whooped by Teams and Zoom, latecomers, in no small part because Google can’t help but rename it every six months.

I believe enterprises choose those either because:

(A) they've already bought into Office 365, so Teams being free to them makes it a no-brainer

or (B) Zoom was the first big name during Covid, so companies that bought into it don't consider changing due to the friction that would cause.

Pretty much every company I've interacted with over interviews and meetings who does use Google Workspace ends up using Meet as well, for the same reason enterprises using O365 as their user directory choose Teams (reason A above).

Sure. Nobody disputes Google’s tech chops. It’s the business side that’s been perennially problematic. That applies to Starlight as much as it does to Meet.

Zoom’s stock is down 86% from ATH. They’re hardly thriving.

I apologize if this comes off as aggressive, but all four of your points are totally wrong and I am sick of seeing these ideas parroted all over HN.

1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things. IF you actually go through the list of all the "products" Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack. Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money, not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life support like Amazon has done with Twitch?

2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't mean they have no competency in the space.

3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your talking points also were the ones criticizing google for attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-bundled

4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a decade.

Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't exist.

> 1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things…95% of them are just consolidated into other areas

Public opinion still stands, they now garner a reputation of “won’t support for long, might kill” on new products they launch. You can’t even trust their owns comma - a month out of Stadia being axed they were talking about how they were going to continue supporting it.

> Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite.

Email and stuff, sure. Video conferencing, less so.

> Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem

Is this a joke? Their hardware support is lacking, and the fact that it’s the “best of the Android ecosystem” says a lot about the quality of that sector. Basically every time this topic comes up on the pixel and Android subreddits, users who have those phones bemoan googles lacking and inconsistent support.

1. Stadia wasn't even first to market. Multiple startups have a better product.

2. G-Suite did well because it was free and had a good collaboration model. It has stagnated, and things like search and folder navigation are hilariously bad. Quip has innovated much more in this space in recent years.

3. If they rolled old chat into new chat, it put my buddy list somewhere, and didn't just delete it without prompting, right? Google voice still exists with the old feature set? Can I have my auto deleted vanity number back? Presumably Meet is always e2e encrypted, like zoom, and its predecessor from Google, right? No? No to all these questions? Wow. Maybe they don't provide feature continuity after all.

4. I am typing this on a pixel 6 pro. Meh.

The following divisions would be better off as spinoffs, IMO:

Stadia (small companies lapped it), Waymo (small companies lapped it), their MVNO, android (then it could stop being a privacy tire fire), chrome (the Mozilla model works, and this would let Microsoft and Brave upstream more easily), g-suite+gmail (no tie in to search or ads), search, double click, AdWords, YouTube.

What startups had better products than Stadia?

No company of any size has lapped Waymo. Waymo is the industry leader by a long shot.

> Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate it's lunch.

That really perplexes me. They had multiple both video and text chats. Their video chat was one of better ones even way before Zoom.

All they need to do is stop making tech demos and make one app doing it. But they just make one sorta kinda decent one, throw it away, and make another one to replace it.

Every time a Google product release makes its way to this site, it seems as though many commenters don't read the article and instead attempt to "dunk on" Google for their history of cancelling projects, vying to express how they distrust Google because of their privacy invasiveness or their inability to commit or some anecdotal evidence dealing with support. Same with Meta products.

It's an exhausting exercise to attempt to find good-faith discussion of the products being released.

While I'm unsure of the market for Starline, I think it presents an interesting alternative to XR-based collaboration: why bother with trying to reinvent the entirety of reality or augment it, when we can insteas capitalize on existing technologies and eke every bit of computw out of them?

Who's to say which methodology is 'correct"? The technology alone is impressive. Hopefully this can see wider adoption to find out where it fits in the technological landscape.

It sounds like Google needs to work on their track record, methinks. Why should we talk about and venerate this tech if it's never going to have a chance due to probable cancellation? Can anyone inside or outside Google guarantee that the owner of this product isn't going to dump it as soon as it's ready for commercialization to start a new project for their career enhancement? I have not seen a single Google exec take on the hard question of "Why does Google cancel stuff so much? How can we trust you?" and answer it, or even try to answer it. All we have is their track record of shuttering products!!

It's exhausting trying to have a good-faith discussion with someone you know is an unfaithful actor. We get all excited about some new stuff Google develops, then months or years later it evaporates with zero support and no warning.

By no means am I arguing the notion that their track record of supporting products (especially hardware) is good, especially when compared to other participants in the space. It is poor, I think most of us have heard that at least once by now.

At the same time, nobody has to venerate anything in these threads either. Positive and negative discussion should be encouraged. But merely stating that "it's gonna be cancelled, place your bets" (as many of the comments at the bottom of this thread do) does not constitute meaningful or intellectually-stimulating conversation, and we as a community should strive to do better than that.

You have a good point. My theory as to why a lot of people assume that Google will simply cancel something isn’t just because Google has cancelled a lot of products because other companies do the same. The reasons are because 1. Google kills products and services rather quickly compared to their peers, 2. Until Stadia, Google never refunded the cost of their product unlike say Amazon with their product experiments, 3. Building on point 2, Google has had fire sales 1 month before a product cancellation announcement without refunds. I was personally burned by this and it does the opposite of building good will, and 4. These product cancellations have directly affected everyone who is now wary of Google starting with Google Reader users. The most disappointing soft cancellation of all was Google Fiber.

This tc article sums it up really well https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/01/stadia-died-because-no-one...

Something I think which really needs to be discussed. Why do tech companies always put a token black person in their PR videos but yet their hiring doesn't reflect that?

Because there aren't enough qualified black people to hire, but that doesn't mean that black people don't exist.

Look at some harrowing stats on who takes the AP CS exam: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/still-no-african-americans...

Sure, but it also feels slightly pretentious. Is representation in PR what the community wants? Why not actually uplifting the community such that artifical representation isn't necessary?

What makes you think that either a) they aren’t trying to do that too or b) that this isn’t a component in that?

It’s not anymore unreasonable to conclude that representation in PR _is_ what the community wants than to decide it _isn’t_ and communities aren’t monoliths anyway.

> enterprise partners such as Salesforce, WeWork

I see this as a negative and not a positive. I have very little to no desire to ever spend money with either of those or have involvement with things that they make extensive use of.

So? They're talking about their employees testing it out internally. It has nothing to do with you.

It's weird how this seems really exciting and yet the fact that it's a google project leaves me assured it will go nowhere, and therefore it's hard to take much of an interest in. Same as that cool automated phone call AI they demo'd a few years ago.

Cool, but not likely to go anywhere in Google's hands.

Product-wise, have they succeeded with anything in the past 10+ years? Chrome is from before then. Android is from before then. Google Maps, Search, and Gmail are all from before then. I guess the Pixel was successful. Seems like everything else is incremental technical improvements of existing product lines.

Do you consider Kubernetes and TensorFlow to be Google “products”, or not?

Google-developed technologies, but not products.

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