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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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