During the Google I/O developer conference in 2021, the company first announced Project Starline. It was a video conferencing hardware and software product from Google"s labs that allowed people to see and talk to each other with advanced 3D video that looked incredibly realistic.
There hasn"t been much news about this research project since the initial announcement. That changed today. Google, just one day ahead of its Google I/O 2024 conference event on May 14, has announced that Project Starline will become a commercially available product sometime in 2025.
In a blog post, Google says that since that official reveal in 2021, it has been putting in thousands of hours in testing with Project Starline inside the company and also with unnamed enterprise partners. The company found that the "magic window" experience of its realistic 3D video conferencing led to "better attentiveness, memory recall and an overall sense of presence" for its users.
Google will not be launching Project Starline on its own. The company revealed it will partner with HP to make and sell the 3D video conferencing system. The blog post quotes Alex Cho, the President of Personal Systems at HP, as saying:
With more than half of meaning and intent communicated through body language versus words alone, an immersive collaboration experience plays an important role in creating authentic human connections in hybrid environments. We are proud to partner with Google to bring this technology to market, harnessing the power of AI to shape the future of collaboration.
The blog post adds that when it does launch, it will support other popular video conference software. It specifically mentions Google Meet and Zoom, but there"s no word on if it might support Microsoft Teams as well.
Google says it will reveal more info on Project Starline"s commercial launch in the coming months. Pricing was not mentioned today, but we would expect it to be on the pricey side.