Project Starline is an immersive video conferencing booth that Google introduced at I/O 2021. It seemed that the project would not go any further, but the company continued development and is trying to make them more accessible.
The booth has 14 cameras and 16 infrared projectors, making a realistic 3D avatar in real-time. Multiple microphones create spatial sound to maximize the sense of the caller’s presence at arm’s length.
The display is 65-inch, domed, and with a resolution of 8K. It is located so far that all sensors correctly read the data. Two Quadro RTX 6000 and two TITAN RTX video cards are used for image and sound processing.
It’s scary to imagine how much such a video call setup would cost, but the company is working to make the technology cheaper and more accessible. Whether such a booth will go on sale is unknown.