I Chatted With Google's Lifesize, Hyperreal AI Companion

The video agent demoed as part of Google Beam is an experiment, and it's shockingly realistic. Is this a helper, or a replacement for people?

3 min read

Sitting down in a comfortably air-conditioned booth in the overheated outdoor demo landscape at Google I/O this week, I had a pleasant and uncanny chat with a smiling person who wasn't actually there. Nor were they even a real human being.

The booth was a demo setup of Google Beam, a large-screen camera-studded telepresence video screen device. As we talked eye to eye, it all felt shockingly real.

I've experienced Google Beam demos before, back when it was called Project Starline: with actual humans on the other end, in holographic glasses-free 3D. This was a whole new twist, and while the demo was 2D, it could easily adopt 3D rendering, too.

@scottsteinsayshi

A hyper realistic uncanny AI video agent demo...

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