Google details why exactly Project Starline is ‘more natural’

Abner Li | Apr 6 2023 - 2:13 pm PT

Project Starline is Google’s immersive video conferencing booth where you and the participant are represented “in 3D at natural scale, enabling eye contact, and providing spatially accurate audio.” Google set out to quantify why Project Starline is “more natural.”

“More natural” is a common piece of feedback that Google hears from users and the company “conducted a series of behavioral lab experiments” to find out why.

The first aspect of that is “more dynamic” back-and-forth conversations (compared to regular video conferencing) with 2-3 more speaker hand-offs on average. Google also found 43% more hand gestures, 26% more head nods, and 49% more eyebrow movements.

Participants also rated their Starline conversations as significantly more natural (“smooth,” “easy,” “not awkward”), higher in quality, and easier to recognize when it was their turn to speak compared to conversations using traditional video conferencing.

Using a Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue (ZEF) Scale, Google found that “participants reported significantly less video meeting fatigue on the ZEF Scale (-31%) and had faster reaction times (-12%) on the cognitive task after using Project Starline compared to traditional video conferencing.”

On the increased attentiveness front:

“We asked participants to write as much as they could remember about each conversation (one in Project Starline, and one in traditional video conferencing). We found that participants wrote 28% more in this task (by character count) after their conversation in Project Starline. This could be because they paid closer attention when in Project Starline, or possibly that they found conversations in Project Starline to be more engaging.”
“We found that participants spent a significantly higher proportion of time looking at their conversation partner’s face in Project Starline (+14%) than they did in traditional video conferencing. In fact, visual attentiveness in Project Starline mirrored that of the in-person condition: participants spent roughly the same proportion of time focusing on their meeting partner’s face in the Project Starline and in-person conditions.”