For those who came in late, Starline is a giant sit-down Zoom which brings 3D video chat to a 7×7-foot sit-down booth.

The goal is to make it seem like the other person is in the room with you, and Google categorizes it as a "research project."  Google research projects have the shelf life of cottage cheese and Project Starline is really expensive, but the company appears to be pressing on with it.

The display side of the video booth features 14 cameras and 16 IR projectors, which all work to create, capture, and track a real-time, photorealistic 3D avatar of the user. Four microphones and two speakers don't just play back speech; spatialised audio and dynamic beamforming supposedly make the speech sound like it's coming out of the avatar's mouth.

The tech allows you to make eye contact with the 3D avatar.

Google is crunching all this data in a beefy dual-Xeon workstation with "four NVIDIA GPUs (two Quadro RTX 6000 and two Titan RTX)."

The display is a 65-inch, 8 K, 60 Hz autostereoscopic lenticular panel that generates a glasses-free 3D view of a life-size avatar.

A Google statement says: "Today, Project Starline prototypes are found in Google offices across the US, with employees using the technology every day for meetings, employee onboarding and building rapport between colleagues."