If this was a consumer product I would buy two of these today, one for myself, and one for my parents. It is more compelling that any product I have seen for a long time.
This is a 3D monitor. Not a light field display like Starline.
The traditional glasses free 3d monitors rely on special coatings on the glass to "split" the direction of a pixel. Some coatings are electronically controlled (like Sony's), some are physical (lenticular filters) It still displays a 2D projection of a 3D image, but twice.
By contrast, my understanding is lightfield displays projects the entire volume. So you don't have a pixel, you have a voxel. So each eye gets a different bit of the same voxel
The term light field display includes lenticulars and parallax barrier displays (and holograms and volumetric displays). They are all different ways of carving up, sweeping out, or multiplexing a light field.
I suspect eventually this will percolate down, somewhat like Facebook's Portal TV (£149) but possibly also integrated with something like a Google Assistant/Siri type smart device to power the software and do other smart-home type things in your home.
Many ordinary folk already have 4k TVs at home and 8k will probably become commonplace in the future. The real bottleneck will be good low-latency broadband both up and down, but fibre to the home should make that easier. I wonder if ISPs in the future will offer QoS guarantees to enable really good videoconferencing?
I mean, Zoom, Meet et al are much better than video conferencing solutions like Webex even from a few years ago, but it's hilarious how much drama there still is around video calls. "oh, sorry, I didn't realise I had muted myself", "can you hear me...?", "I think we just lost Steve", and so on. I'll be glad to see all of that just go away.
I doubt you need gigabit for an 8K stream. The real issue is the abysmal common network infrastructure. Latency will be a bottleneck if most ISPs don't care about treating your packets properly.
Most internet providers here in Finland provides you fiber connections from 100-1000mbs pretty cheap. And 4g/5g connections from 100-300mbs for cheap prices too. Most of them does not have any data caps.
I have 300/100mbs connection which costs 20 euros in month.
Agreed, 10Mbps is likely where it'll be, probably less. If I were to guess, they are going to apply a lot of smarts to texture mapping to avoid needing a lot of bandwidth.
Doubtful, IMO. The fact that you need it to be both extremely low latency and with essentially zero compression artifacts (probably lossless, based on their goal). If the numbers listed here[1] are correct, then the most efficient lossy codec at that time was doing 100 minutes of 8k video in ~37GB of data. From that we can intuit that it was using an average of 50 Mbps for that 100 minutes of video. For the most efficient codec, and I'm not even sure from that whether it was using lossy or lossless numbers, because apparently HVEC can do both (but I would assume lossy, since it's about streaming video in that case).
You can't do weird texture mapping or lossy compression and expect people to really seem like they are there. Even if you don't notice that stuff normally watching a video, I think you'll notice it when you're interacting like someone is really in front of you, and that will throw off the immersion.
HVEC is no longer king of the hill when it comes to compression efficiency. AV1 and the upcoming VVC do better.
That said, my intuition is they aren't doing a pure video encoding solution. The fact that they talk about 3d modeling leads me to believe they are doing a combination of model + texture to get the realistic results. That would significantly decrease the amount of bandwidth and computational power needed. Over a low bandwidth situation you'd simply need to send model updates and do some smart interpolation to determine what things should look like.
Similar to the concept that playing a 3d game requires MB of resources but recording the same game at 8k would require a boatload more memory.
My assumption is they are using LIDAR to get a good model, high quality cameras to texture things, and a nice AI to stitch things together and interpolate when data isn't arriving fast enough.
I think this is what will be done in the future. You will interact with the camera for 15 minutes or so and it will create a custom compreasion algorithm for you.
It heavily depends on what encoder and config you use. In my experience, 20Mbps (or less) HEVC by Turing NVEnc realtime encoder is enough for 1080 60p. Also halving frame rate won't halve bitrate because of how video compressed by reference frame. Also video meeting won't move pictures as much as FPS gaming.
I think one of the major aspects of this technology is that the person you are talking with appears in its real size, with the same ratio than in real life. Something you cannot do with a smartphone, except if you are referring to a projector.
I've used the Echo Show 10 with the drop-in feature for my mom with vision issues (basically can't use touchscreens) and it works fairly well. That said I fully agree with you that something like this would be really excellent. A full-sized person's face and head in 3D is far easier to recognize and understand than a poorly lit 2D 10" display.
