@tajc Honestly this is super amazing, just like rotunda of gateways in Sanctum Santorum of Dr Strange. It can boost the connectivity across timezones. Are you live anywhere in India or planning to?

@prad_vv thank you! we don’t yet have a portal in india, but it’s a high priority for us! we’re actually talking with a prospect now about connecting their offices in bangalore and tokyo. we’d love to find more opportunities like this, so please share if you know of businesses or institutions that would be keen!

@owenfar thank you for the kind words! regarding the “busy” state you pretty much guessed it! we run a lightweight local model for realtime pose and face detection (no recognition so still anonymous) to understand the position of people and infer things like when the portal is in use. :)

@kyrylosilin thanks for checking us out! - re eye contact the camera is hidden inside the screen. users within a certain range of positions more centrally will get true eye contact, which is easily achieved when using portals 1:1 or in small groups with the right furniture setup. users at the edge of the screen will not always get perfect eye contact though. - re latency, tonari’s system is incredibly fast before adding network latency. within domestic japan, we can achieve sub-100ms essentially across all islands. this would be generally true between most locations with good backbones within 1000km of each other. japan to san francisco or LA though (5000km) would add about 50ms of internet latency, bringing tonari’s glass to glass latency to around 140-150ms. this is still within a threshold where for most people it’s imperceptible.

@aris_nakos thanks! lenticular holographic displays trade spatial resolution for angular resolution, meaning you need to divide the image into as many angles as you want but then you get less resolution when viewing from any given angle. in practice we didn’t feel the benefits were strong enough given the increased costs and trade offs in image quality. display technologies will keep improving though so there could be a point in the future where it would make sense to build a holographic tonari portal! we see our future product lineup continuing to both push the boundaries of what’s possible at the highest-end, and providing lower-cost options for remote education and homes, so we’ll look forward to these developments.

@toniko thank you! re network, tonari needs a stable connection with wired internet. we recommend business fiber lines where available, but we've seen tonari run well on residential fiber too in some cases. 60Mbps is recommended for the best quality. you can find more info on our installation requirements here: https://tonari.no/get-started we've also done a lot already to cope with some amounts of packet loss and things that would normally occur on these networks, and we'll continue making more improvements. thankfully, internet is getting better everywhere too and we're excited to see fiber rolling out faster across the world, as well as improvements to systems like 5G and starlink which will likely work well enough for tonari at some point in the near future.

@asherdorianthorne we're now delivering portals in more than 40 countries, including the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and most of Europe! you can see the check out the full list here: https://tonari.no/get-started

@itamar_stollman thank you! tonari portals start at $24,999 - keep in mind they are physically large (floor to ceiling display and about 100kg of hardware) and very high quality, and actually only about half the price of a typical Cisco meeting room! with the current product, we're targeting businesses and institutions that need high-connectivity either overseas or domestically, and already spend significantly on business travel and other tools to try to keep up connectivity and engagement. with our current customers, we've seen that tonari pays for itself with even small reductions in business travel, and by helping organizations improve team-building, expand hiring and accelerate onboarding, and decrease employee turnover for strong performers who would otherwise feel more disconnected from the leadership and happenings in HQs. we've seen a lot of success with companies in creative industries, manufacturing, finance, consulting, construction, and even in startups and SMEs that are expanding abroad to access more hiring, sales, BD, and partner opportunities. this said, we're committed to expanding our product line and driving costs down without compromising on quality, so that we can get tonari portals into homes, remote education, eldercare and healthcare, and many other facets of our daily lives where emotional connection is crucial to the quality of relationships and services. this has always been our mission and purpose. with new developments and economies of scale, the next milestones are to bring a sub-$10K product to market, and then again a product in the few thousands of dollars. in the consumer market, we want to see tonari portals become as commonplace as TVs and other large home appliances, so that families and friends, and especially elderly folks with less mobility, have more options to be emotionally connected with loved ones.