Google found a way to make virtual meetings suck less

Since it was first demoed in 2021, Project Starline has felt like the kind of thing only a company like Google would bother trying to build: a fancy 3D video booth with no near-term commercial prospects that promises to make remote meetings feel like real life.

Now, Starline is nearly ready for primetime. It’s being rebranded to Google Beam and coming to a handful of offices later this year. Google has managed to shrink the technology into something it says will be priced comparably to existing videoconference systems. The real bet is that other companies will want to make their own hardware for Beam calls. “The devices aren’t really the point,” says Andrew Nartker, the project’s general manager. “The point is that we can beam things anywhere we need to with the infrastructure that we built.”

Beam uses a light field display and six cameras to render a volumetric, real-time 3D version of the person on the other end of a videocall. There’s no headset, no weird glasses. Just a chunky display, a Chrome OS-powered compute puck the size of a DVD player, and a bespoke AI model working with Google Cloud in the background to stitch it all together. Google has created a reference design for manufacturers, starting with HP, to make into their own hardware.

I used Beam during a demo at Google’s campus the day before its annual I/O conference, where AI is once again taking center stage. Beam wasn’t something originally designed for the modern AI boom, but its trajectory has been impacted by it. I was shown the earliest prototype that filled a small room and relied fully on local computing. Over the last couple of years, Google moved the vast majority of that horsepower to the cloud via a custom AI video model, which paved the way for the simpler, cheaper hardware design that HP is now using.

The pricing and availability details for HP’s Google Beam device are coming next month. Google says that Salesforce, Deloitte, Duolingo, and a handful of other companies have committed to installing units in their offices. Its video model takes a couple of milliseconds to process all the data — one stereo video stream for each eye, captured by six standard-color cameras — over typical office internet. T-Mobile even tested it over LTE once. (I noticed some lag a couple of times during my demo at Google’s headquarters.)

While developing Beam, Google observed that people feel a real “fatigue” from regular, 2D virtual meetings. “We’ve done rigorous studies that show people feel a stronger sense of attentiveness” after using Beam, says Jason Lawrence, its head of engineering and research. “They remember more of their conversations. They tend to be more animated. We see more nonverbal behaviors.”

Those subtle cues may feel insignificant, but they add up when you experience Beam for more than a couple of minutes. I found myself wanting to physically lean into conversations. Being able to make eye contact with the other person gave a feeling of presence that you can’t get through a traditional webcam. Calls on the latest AI model paired with the commercial, HP-made hardware for Beam are noticeably richer. Colors pop more, and the spatial audio sounds dramatically better than Google’s in-house prototypes.

With the hardware in a better place, Google is now focused on making Beam a real alternative to Zoom or Meet. I was shown a new screen-mirroring feature that placed a browser window to the side of whoever I was looking at, and another call demonstrated live translation from Spanish to English. Beam is limited to one-on-one calls for now, though group calling is coming, along with the ability to display regular, 2D video calls.

Nartker says the long-term vision is to bring Beam into homes and not just offices. “We’re going to build a bunch of devices,” he says. For now, though, Beam is another Google moonshot taking its first step into reality — one that might make remote meetings marginally less painful.