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 photos.) But then I connected to a Google product manager sitting in front of another Beam setup elsewhere on its campus, and it was as if he had just sat down across the table. Or as if the screen had inflated to a sphere with him at its most forward part.Google accomplishes this by using what it calls a “state-of-the-art AI volumetric video model” to fuse the input from those six cameras into output shown on that light-field screen. That extremely high-resolution display technology shows slightly different images to each eye that create a 3D effect without your having to strap on the kind of glasses required for 3D TVs.Light field isn’t a new concept; the startup Lytro tried to commercialize the technology in its cameras starting in 2012, and firms such as San Jose-based Light Field Lab are working on their own display implementations of it. But Google and HP bring much deeper pockets and corporate customers with the budgets that might accommodate what must be an expensive rig.(Google’s I/O post about Beam says HP will reveal more details at the InfoComm trade show in Orlando next month. Google suggests Beam will need at least 30Mbps of bandwidth, which is less than I would have guessed.)Recommended by Our EditorsBeam will not be a Google-only product, supporting Zoom as well as Google Meet; the latter will include the near-real-time language translation that Google showed off at I/O.Despite a presumably massive amount of computation and bandwidth needed, the audio and video stayed in sync throughout this roughly five-minute session. (“Call” seems inadequate to describe the experience.) But I also noticed some glitches around the edges of my interlocutor’s appearance.For example, when he picked up a green apple, a part of a Starline demo we took in at last year’s I/O, parts of his fingers shimmered around it and the spaces between the apple and his hand blurred. Then I noticed a small green shimmer on his neck that roughly matched where the fruit’s shiny surface could have been reflected on his skin. Beam also seems sensitive to your own placement between its cameras, which can allow for some in-call mischief. Leaning too far to one side or the other yielded an onscreen alert to center myself, a reminder that this is built for chats between individual people. And reaching one arm too far to one side or the other results in your hand appearing to be cut off, with only the virtual background behind where that appendage should have been.And if you reach behind you, you will appear and pierce that wall with your hand. Beam supports virtual backgrounds, although the one for this call was the most boring kind of flat gray possible.The whole effect, however, was realistic enough that a handshake seemed in order instead of the now-traditional Zoom wave. We could not do that, but we could do the closest approximation of a high-five that I’ve ever seen possible on a video call.