The question for me is how much it matters after the novelty wears off.
I count at least 5 waves of 3D technology starting in 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. Each time there's a surge of popularity driven by the legitimately amazing initial experience. And each time people slowly stop caring. People were incredibly excited about Avatar, and many thought it would change the movie industry. But how many people now go out of the way to see something in 3D?
I'm a regular in the XR space. A popular running theory is that wearing something is the barrier right now. Often what's brought up is that the only wearable to make it to the prime time is the smartwatch--and even then it's a very slow uptake. People absolutely do not want to wear something to make marginal gains in their viewing experience.
In that respect I'm very excited for Starline and related technologies--"trying them" will finally just involve being in the line of sight of one rather than having an attendant fit some goggles onto your head.
I honestly think it's amazing and I'm sure the novelty would wear off, but it would still be useful. One of the things that stood in the way of 3D viewing was dedicated hardware, which is the same issue here. Although the need to wear glasses is gone, you still need to buy some serious equipment for it. Maybe at some point this will be bundled into a normal TV setup and people will just take it for granted that it's there
Anything's possible. But I want the people saying 3D TV/monitors failed because the glasses were just too burdensome to argue things out with the VR people who say that 3D is so amazing that the (much heavier!) facehugger units will take over the world.
Oh, I'd bet that team did a great job with 3D. (For those who didn't see it, it was a movie with great visual effects designed to blow the viewer's mind.) But you and that movie are the exceptions that prove the rule: for most people and for most movies, it just doesn't add much. The reason people go to see something on the stage is never stereoscopy!
Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely than video and 2D displays will ever do. That's a noble research goal if nothing else, I don't get the skepticism.
There are several reasons 3D content and previous generation displays didn't take off, but there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century and are only now becoming popular). AFAICT the real time photogrammetry they're using here along with the no-glasses 3D display is a major leap forward. If they can get it cheap and reliable enough to mass market, it would be a game changer.
I certainly know what kind of display and teleconferencing software I want when the next pandemic hits, and it's not what we have now.
> Replicating the experience of in-person communication much more closely
That's not a problem people express much, at least not in ways where "3D" points to a solution. When I want to see people in person, it's not because of a lack of stereoscopy. I want to hug them, to break bread with them.
> there's no reason to believe a revolutionary new approach and product couldn't change this
There is indeed! In specific, the many times we have already had revolutionary new approaches and products that were met with great enthusiasm in the market for a few years.
I'd add that the telephone was not only a very successful technology for a century, audio calls still remain very popular. (I'm not sure what your work calls are like these days, but quite a lot of people turn off video in mine.) The lesson I take from that is that people mainly self-generate the feeling of interpersonal connection, and they can do it with very little in the way of cues. To me that's another strong indication that no new 3D technology will make much of a difference.
"Hard tech" often only matures after several hype cycles. Sometimes cool tech demos can be produced a century or more beforehand. If you were in the 1980s and people were talking about video calls being the next big thing, you might point out that people have been working on video calls since the 1930s[0], and it hasn't caught on in every one of the hype cycles that have followed, so that's an indication that it won't catch on in the future. Video calls have caught on now though - especially as they've reached mobile devices instead of requiring a literal booth in your house, as with AT&T's initial "Picturephone" tech in the 70s.
I will say though that people tend to assume that each new technology will replace the preceding technology (text->audio->video->VR/light-field->...), but in fact it tends to end up just supplementing the existing tech.
> When I want to see people in person, it's not because of a lack of stereoscopy.
Of course, I'm not saying this will replace physical communication (I should've said "simulating" instead of "replicating"). But it's a clear step forward for traditional teleconferencing solutions. What do you think is the next leap from 2D video and displays? We're at the point of diminishing returns as far as increasing resolution goes, most consumers don't have a need for 8K or higher res displays. VR/AR is chugging along, but we're still a few generations away from mass market adoption.
> I'd add that the telephone was not only a very successful technology for a century, audio calls still remain very popular.
I don't understand. Video calls were never meant to replace audio calls, they just added a new sensory experience. It's perfectly fine for both technologies to co-exist for different moments and preferences. In a similar way this 3D approach is an extension to traditional 2D video conferencing if people have the equipment and prefer it. Judging by the expressions of the people in the demo and some of the comments here, you're underestimating how impactful this could be, especially if it's polished and cheap enough.
It's not a clear step forward except in technical terms. Those often don't matter. For example, the big revolution in the last 20 years is not faster computers, it's mobile ones.
I don't have much reason to think there is any near term "next leap from 2D video and displays". 2D renderings are more than 40,000 years old. They have improved drastically in resolution and fidelity. Computers added being dynamic and interactive to that. it's really not clear that 3D rendering adds much.
> Judging by the expressions of the people in the demo and some of the comments here, you're underestimating how impactful this could be
I am not, because that kind of novelty-driven excitement has driven every wave of popular 3D rendering technology for 170 years. VR/AR has been close to mass market adoption for 25 years. We've just been through an unprecedented period of demand for at-home entertainment, and the hardware that many said was finally, finally the thing turns out once again not to matter.
People have had those excited faces every time. There were people jazzed about the possible impact every time. The Brewster Stereoscope. The ViewMaster (with the US Defense Department purchasing 6 million reels on the theory it would revolutionize training). 3D movies in the 1950s. VR in the 1980s and 1990s. 3D movies again this century. 3D TV for 2 CESes. And then the latest wave of VR, which you agree is still not there despite fantastic investment from companies floating in cash.
Could it be different this time? Maybe! But if we keep measuring it by novelty effects, we're setting ourselves up for the exact same failure that keeps happening.
> the big revolution in the last 20 years is not faster computers, it's mobile ones
Surely the improvements in manufacturing processes, faster hardware and better screens are partly responsible for that. The iPhone as a concept has existed since the 1980s, and revolutionary ideas like what General Magic tried to produce in the 90s were just too early to be successful. When Apple tried it again in the late 00s it was a massive success, but technology finally reached a point when it was commercially feasible.
So it doesn't take much to push a product to mass adoption. Just the right industry circumstances, a manufacturer willing to take the risk and capable hardware and software existing to make it happen.
> We've just been through an unprecedented period of demand for at-home entertainment, and the hardware that many said was finally, finally the thing turns out once again not to matter.
Are you dismissing the potential of VR/AR as well? The current innovation wave we're on is much bigger than whatever we had before. Headsets are becoming cheaper, more comfortable and accessible, and the visual tech we have now is leaps and bounds better than previous generations. Once we get to being able to put on sunglasses and experience different worlds, though likely sooner than that, the market adoption will likely go through the roof.
> People have had those excited faces every time.
I think it's different this time. It's not just it being 3D, but the merging of new generations of light field cameras, face/eye tracking, powerful ML algorithms, low latency networks and revolutionary displays is miles ahead of previous attempts. You can't just compare this to the ViewMaster and last century VR. The improvements here are much more substantial, and if they can make it cheap and reliable enough it could be a ground breaking product.
Again, you're arguing that the technology might get better. I don't disagree. I'm not comparing the technology of the ViewMaster. I'm comparing the lack of demonstrated demand/utility and the pattern of hype.
Every one of the products I named was greeted at the time exactly like you are now. The new technology was amazing! The potential was unlimited! And for the repeats like 3D movies and VR: It's different this time!
I agree it might be different this time. Nobody's denying that. Aliens might land tomorrow. What I'm saying is that because of the clear pattern of "OMG novelty! OMG possibilty!" around 3D tech that has failed repeatedly for 170 years, you can't just uncritically make the same arguments. If you want to be persuasively realistic, you have to explain why the 3D novelty effect isn't the major driver this time. Because the long evidence is that 3D displays just don't matter enough for people to stick with them.
Just one final comment: I agree with you that there are technical innovations that don't result in mass adoption and ultimately don't matter. Where I think you're mistaken is that the leap from 2D displays to 3D holograms (or 3D displays as an intermediate step) is similar to the leap from black and white TVs to color TVs. It's obvious that it's the next big step since our world is not black and white in the same way that it's not 2D. The potential market for that is global so we've been pushing in that direction for 170 years, as you say (though sources for that claim would be appreciated as I couldn't find any), yet the technology just wasn't there to make it a good product.
Do you remember the Virtual Boy? Or the old cheap red/green paper glasses, and recently plastic glasses that are uncomfortable, darken the picture and give you headaches? These are all issues that better technology can solve, thus reducing the barrier to entry. A display that shows a 3D image without glasses to every viewer with a head tracking effect can potentially solve a lot of them. With similar improvements in camera technology, networks (5G anyone?), ML, etc. and all the pieces are starting to fall into place for what could be a revolution in how we communicate electronically.
Or Google might just axe it as they've done before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Still bummed about Project Ara...)
I agree it's "obvious" that it's the "next big step". And I'm saying that's the problem.
Obviousness is a feeling people have about ideas in their head. Feelings can be useful or misleading. Every single person who got behind previous generations of 3D thought that it was "obviously" the next step. Many thousands of people had that feeling each time, buying in to a new platform. Great sums of money were invested by smart execs. All of those people were wrong each time. All of them. That you have the same feeling is not proof that it will be different this time. Indeed, the history suggests you should distrust that feeling.
Color video is a great example, so thanks for bringing it up. Color TV and color movies were quickly and widely adopted despite the extra cost and complexity. But 3D movies and TV have failed. Wearing a pair of glasses is not a major burden; 64% of Americans do it every day. Millions of people tried 3D movies and gave a collective shrug. The pretty obvious lesson to learn from those waves is that people are drawn to the concept but actually do not care in practice once the novelty wears off.
Another way to look at it is that people don't even care about stereoscopic vision much in actual life. Humans have a lot of mechanisms for extracting spatial information from the world, and the stereo-ness of it doesn't matter much. About 10% of people don't have it; they can still drive just fine. My grandfather, for example, was blinded in one eye as a kid, and nobody ever noticed. You can try it yourself; go out for a walk and keep one eye closed. Your 3D perception will be basically unaffected except for relatively close objects.
So sure, as I've said repeatedly, anything can happen. I'm just saying there is good reason to believe this will not happen, and excellent reason to not just assume it will. To see this not as a technological problem, but a problem of demand.
As to citations, I'm not sure what you're looking for. I've mentioned the Brewster Stereoscope twice in this thread. Ditto the ViewMaster. What do you need that isn't in the first page of Google results for those?
Wow, this is a pretty ableist take. Deaf people or hard of hearing exist.
I've got a hearing problem where I struggle to make out what people are saying on a phone but with a video call I can add lip-reading and visual cues which helps me keep on thread.
Which is excellent, and I totally support that. But that doesn't change the market dynamics that I'm describing. We probably should live in a world where what drove the adoption of video calling was supporting the hard of hearing. But we don't, so it's not a relevant factor for the market analysis of what will drive the adoption of 3D video.
> (e.g. electric cars were invented in the 19th century and are only now becoming popular)
I hate this example, and it's like one of the most common ones on HN.
As said by thousands of people and many documentaries before me , the electric car had numerous real conspiracies working against it, some of which were the most powerful financial groups in the world.[0]
The 'electric car' wasn't made popular and possible by recent technological strides -- although it was made better.
The success and popularity of the electric vehicle was made possible by financial shifts away from petroleum exploration, facilitated by dwindling profits and increased scarcity of oil, and encouraged by a movement towards sustainability both from the social culture of the world and the various actions of government from country to country.
Yes, range has improved. Yes, the cars are more intelligent and better to drive -- but these improvements have been seen across the automotive industry since its' inception with ICE based vehicles included.
The real motivating factor behind the electric car is the environment that now exists that allows such endeavors to be profitable -- an environment that not only includes technological improvements like you hint towards, but more importantly it's an environment that fosters development of such things due to the existence of a profit incentive and increased governmental-body cooperation.
All that said, unless Cisco is even more evil than I realized (woah..), I have a hard time presuming that video conferencing has been held back by the same sort of conspiratorial under-handed back-office dealings that slowed the progress of EV adoption.
Why does it matter which circumstances allowed the electric car to become popular only now? Whether that's because of major industry and consumer shifts, or because the technology matured enough for mass market, they have the same effect. It's certainly a combination of both, and we shouldn't downplay the advances in battery technology alone.
I mentioned that example because the previous two comments were dismissing this attempt at 3D teleconferencing on the grounds of it being old technology with past failures. But I think we agree that it takes a certain industry environment along with a technical leap to make a technology truly popular. Even if that never ends up happening in this case and it remains a niche product, we should applaud the technical merits here instead of being dismissive.
For that matter video teleconferencing period has only just really hit critical mass even though there were videophones at the NY World's Fair in the 1960s and camera systems have been around in conference rooms for a few decades.
What really happened was that it became more or less accessible to anyone with a laptop and an even marginal network connection for basically no cost. And, oif course, the last 18 months really pushed it over the finish line if it wasn't already.
Exactly. Video calls have become successful because remote work has become successful. The goal was not to make video calls. The goal was to further improve a team that was already remote. And I think you're right that the low/no cost hardware for most adopters has been key. Which I think is further proof that the demand is really pretty modest. I was just on a work meeting where half the people had their cameras off, and where I often didn't have the Zoom window on top because the video was very much secondary to what they were saying.
If you talk to daily Instagram users, you'll find out what problem it solves. In particular, it was the lucky winner in the crowd of early photo-sharing-on-mobile apps. But the demand for that was proven by early photo sharing successes like Flickr. Realizing people would want to do that on their pocket camera device is not a big leap given what people were already doing to share photos from their mid-aughts cameraphones phones.
There's no such plausible story for 3D video calls. It's not like people are already demanding 3D displays for any of their other 3D stuff. The 3D first-person shooter, for example, has been around for decades. But 3D displays have never been popular despite being available for at least a decade.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but I'd need to see some data. Since you haven't experienced it, you would be buying based on hype, on the concept of 3D. As I said, I'm not arguing that the novelty is appealing. I'm saying that once people actually experience it and the novelty wears off, people stop caring.
Another issue here is that this is being sold as like "being there", but it's more like "being there at a jail" where you can see person but can't get close to them, can't touch them, can't hand them anything. I have immigrant friends who do calls with their parents basically daily. They do it with mid-grade consumer tech, even though they could easily afford big screens and high-res cameras. That suggests to me that image size and video quality are not as important for this market as one might think at first blush.
You're not winning anything with casting Skype on TV, except messing with another remote for audio controls (which is in no way immersive or often not even high quality).
And yes OF COURSE I predicate buying on it actually delivering to the extent people describe it in the marketing video, it's ridiculous I have spell it out.
Casting Skype to a TV is not the only possibility Right now with off the shelf hardware one could make a great video-call station. 4k screen, 4k camera, high-quality mics and speakers. But approximately nobody does it because laptops and iPads and phones are generally good enough for them.
That to me demonstrates that, contra your initial assertion, there isn't a big market for this.
As to the last part, you've gone from "I will get it" no questions asked to what sounds like "I will get it if it checks out". But that's a big jump. You've gone from an early adopter to a mainstream purchaser. From one of those people that buys things on Kickstarter to the much, much larger group who want to see proof of value before they buy.
I think that's very reasonable, but it's exactly the kind of reasonable behavior that has killed 3D over and over in the past. By definition novelty doesn't last, so by the time mainstream purchasers might be ready, the social proof just isn't there.
It depends on what you mean by want. Are you having feelings of desire? Sure. That's the point of demos and commercials. I fully believe you have those feelings, and trust you to be an expert on them.
But I've done a lot of customer development over the years. People say all sorts of things. The question when doing market analysis is what they'll actually do. And the better guide there is what they're actually doing , not what they say they would do.
So when you say that "everyone in immigrant communities" will buy it, I'm going to be skeptical because what people are actually doing is nothing like that. They could already move in this direction with existing tech. As far as I can tell, they aren't. If you have evidence otherwise, I'd love to see it.
I also can't find evidence of third parties competing with shared higher-quality video call setups, which is what we'd expect to see if the demand were there but the price hadn't fallen enough yet. That's the pattern we saw with video arcades and internet cafes/wangbas, for example. Wangbas are still getting by because they've shifted to gamers, who are willing to pay up for better hardware and connections (and room for team play). But I can't find mention of any similar shift for video calls. E.g. India's PCO network seems to be in rapid free-fall, not reinventing themselves around high-quality video calls. That suggests what all the other market data suggests: to the extent people want video calling, relatively low-quality gear like smartphones and laptops are in practice sufficient.
>Tell me a problem WhatsApp solves. It's just a fancy SMS.
I gather it mostly solves that SMS is expensive in a lot of contexts. Personally I never use it because most of the people I text with have US phones. And the one person who doesn't, we use Facebook.
Yes? Other than not being hip, how is Instagram better than Myspace? WhatsApp at least added features over SMS, although it sacrificed interoperability and went all-in on a closed system to get there. Newer is not always better.
I count at least 5 waves of 3D technology starting in 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. Each time there's a surge of popularity driven by the legitimately amazing initial experience. And each time people slowly stop caring. People were incredibly excited about Avatar, and many thought it would change the movie industry. But how many people now go out of the way to see something in 3D?