Even though it's not my first time seeing this demo, I'm still blown away by it every time. God, this is still freaky even after doing it before. Every time it starts like This is Google Beam, formerly known as Project Starline.
It's Google's answer to mundane 2D meetings, and you're about to start seeing it out in the real world. Google has been working on this for a long time, but what Google is finally getting ready to ship as Google Beam, I think, has the chance to really change how people do meetings in the office. When you're using Beam, the best part of it is that you don't have to wear anything.
It's not like AR glasses or VR headsets. It's just a giant TV with a bunch of custom cameras and sensors that Google has developed. And the end experience is that you're looking at a 3D hologram of someone.
It's not a hologram, but it appears to be. It's almost like a hol or something. It feels futuristic.
And ultimately, you feel like you're there with the person, even though you're not. It's a hard thing to describe when you're not seeing it, but it's very powerful. Google helped us get some of this footage to at least show a little bit of what this is like.
Again, you're never going to get the full experience without being fully present and in a being yourself, but I do think you're able to see this depth and the 3D of it all. And it's just very unique and it's very hard to capture, but we did our best. The thing that really sticks with me about Google Beam is that it has this sense of presence that you just cannot get unless you're with someone physically.
It's like it's it's uncanny valleyesque like and then the longer you look at it the more present you feel. But initially it's almost like the opposite of presence. It's like this is tricking me.
When I did this beam demo I picked up on a lot of stuff that I would have never picked up through a laptop. You know the way that the hands move, the tilt of the head, uh the eyes looking off to the side. There's a a richness to it, I guess, that you don't get from any other kind of conferencing software.
I don't know. It makes you want to stay in a meeting longer, which is like a weird thing to say. Uh, but it doesn't drain you like normal virtual meetings.
And that's actually something that Google has found in its testing of this over the years is that people who try it report that they have less meeting fatigue. The thing we weren't actually able to film is the final device of Beam that is shipping to the public with HP later this year. It's going to start showing up in offices at Salesforce, Deote, and other companies that Google and HP are working with.
This design with HP is smaller. It's nowhere near as big as some of these early research prototypes we saw before Google was able to shrink a lot of the compute down. They're doing most of this in the cloud now with a proprietary AI model they developed that creates this 3D experience.
Google is not telling us pricing yet. That's going to be coming out very soon with HP, but I was able to get out that it's going to be priced very comparatively to the existing virtual conferencing setups that are in offices today. So, this is something that's not, you know, exorbitantly expensive like it was when Google was first developing it.
They've really shrunk the tech down and they think it's finally something that they can commercialize at scale. So, I'm lucky that I've tried this before when it was project Starline. Vern behind me though, today was his first time trying this and he got to see the full thing and it was really fun to see his face the moment he sat down because it reminded me of my first demo which is just you kind of go, "Holy like this is real.
" Like it feels real even though it's not. And it's something that you only experience the first time, but it's pretty cool when you do in a while. That's insane.
Wait, hold on. Literally, the first time I did it, I was like this. It's like, what?
What?
