Google’s Futuristic Beam Tech Almost Made Me Forget I Was on a Video Call

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google Beam does something uncanny to a 65-inch display: It transforms it into a strange sort of window through which the person to whom you’re speaking appears not as a two-dimensional pack of pixels but as a 3D, holographic image floating in front of the display.

Google first showed off what was then called Project Starline at I/O 2021, itself staged as a virtual event due to the pandemic. Almost three years after starting tests with such firms as T-Mobile and Salesforce, the company is now ready to commercialize this technology. 

Last year, Google announced that HP would bring the first Beam system to market, a partnership CEO Sundar Pichai touted in I/O’s two-hour keynote this week. On Wednesday afternoon, I got to take a look at prototype hardware in a booth at the show.

The six cameras around a large screen sets Beam apart from typical video conferencing. (Google didn’t allow …