The 4K blackout pod

May 16, 2023 5:31 PM

“Removing the surroundings with black [backdrop] helps your brain to actually fill in the gaps and build this kind of 3D representation"
posted by folklore724 (12 comments total)

Didn’t we just have a single-link fpp about this same company last week?
posted by Silvery Fish at 6:18 PM on May 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Didn’t we just have a single-link fpp about this same company last week?

I think you are thinking of the Project Starlight post.
posted by Dr. Twist at 6:33 PM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, the poster was told that the problem was with their source. This is a link to an actual article.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:06 PM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the update and clarification.
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:30 PM on May 16, 2023

When we switched to receiving therapy remotely at the beginning of the Pandemic, I had to solve these same nebulous issues in setting up our Therapy Nook. The large screen farther away, the shallow parallax to the camera, the cozy, isolated surroundings... The other person is the same size they would be in a small therapy office, and the whole thing feels very intimate. The experiment has worked out to the point that I do not miss in-person therapy too much, and I believe Mrs. tigrrrlily is of a similar opinion.
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:37 PM on May 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

This looks neat, but… at €24,000 for one (or €48,000 for a pair), you could hold an awful lot of in-person meetings before you’d break even on the cost.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:37 AM on May 17, 2023

That's a pretty neat idea! I bet it'd make one-on-one meetings over Zoom way less awkward and stressf

[...] the Finns have been hard at work on the software part of the product, aimed at providing insight into the pods’ usage for the HR or building managers. [...] a project that would see a heart rate sensor integrated into the seat in the pod, which could potentially provide anonymised and aggregated data on the users’ health and mental well-being.

Oh fuck offffffff
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 9:03 AM on May 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's nice to see telepresence equipment with an aim towards quality of the experience rather than yet more voice-heritage vendors offering preposterously-overpriced low quality sensors with tinny microphones for bolting to the wall of a conference room. Good gear is surprisingly hard to come by unless you're throwing together at least a low-end studio, and lighting is hard.

It's a lot less nice to see the massive shove of everyone back into offices for poorly defined Reasons which then necessitates blowing $25,000 on a space pod to show up for a meeting. The expensive space pod is kinda likely to be booked to the moon anyway (yet somehow weirdly unoccupied half the time?) so you're taking your meeting at your desk with an awful laptop cam and everyone around you bellowing just like the olden days.
posted by majick at 10:46 AM on May 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

"anonymised and aggregated data on the users’ health and mental well-being"

Turns out it's another torment nexus. Neat.
posted by MengerSponge at 1:45 PM on May 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

I noticed a while back that when I watch HDR movies on my 4K TV (65") in the dark, and if they are filmed mostly with lenses with focal lengths similar to (or shorter than) the human eye, and if I close one eye (!) my brain turns it into 3D. Marvelous full-on 3D, as good as any I've seen in the theatre.

It's pretty awesome. Paper Girls on Prime was a particularly good show for this.
posted by lastobelus at 4:03 PM on May 17, 2023

Seems pretty awkward to me. Can't think of any of my regular meetings that would benefit from that level of interpersonal fidelity. Maybe interviewing.

But I'll not fault them for trying; being able to replicate even a sliver of the in-person experience, without actually having to travel, is sort of the whole point of telecommunications.

And TBH it seemed like for a while there, the fidelity of the experience was diminishing. (The telephone in particular has taken a hell of a beating, remaining only a shadow of itself both in terms of fidelity and social utility, thanks to cut-rate digitization and incessant telemarketing.) So it's nice to see the needle move in the other direction.

OTOH... if we follow the "how will your product get your users laid?" question to its logical conclusion, this thing or something like it will eventually be used for many more, uh, personal calls than business ones.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:54 PM on May 17, 2023

MKBHD got to test this (or something very similar). He was impressed (SLYT).
posted by malthusan at 11:07 AM on May 18, 2023