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tonari
p/tonarilife-sized video portals: be together in-person, anywhere.
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Taj Campbell

tonari - life-sized video portals: be together in-person, anywhere.

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tonari portals provide natural, effortless, life-sized communication that feels like being together in-person. built on next-gen hardware and software with 10x more fidelity than video calls, sub-100ms latency, true eye contact, and room-scale immersion.

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Taj Campbell
Hunter
📌
Our goal is to make tonari portals ubiquitous over time, and today we’re making two major product announcements that will help bring tonari to many more places: a free-standing option to enable fast and easy setup of tonari without construction; and location hopping for instantaneous travel between tonari portals. With tonari we’re attempting to solve the curse of distance: the fact that humans are built to be together, and yet we often live and work apart. Travel has gotten safer and faster, but is still costly, time-consuming, and stressful for our bodies and environment. Video calls offer convenience, but they don’t facilitate enough empathy, creativity, or trust. The idea for tonari portals — with their floor-to-ceiling size, ultra low latency, and natural eye-to-eye contact — is to make people in two locations feel like they’re really together in-person. We’ve engineered and refined our hardware and software from the ground up to be over 10-times faster and higher fidelity than all other video communications. We’ve also packaged everything into a seamless and elegant design that is natural and universal: tonari portals are as intuitive for toddlers and the elderly as they are for students, teachers, executives, and co-workers. tonari is already providing great value for many companies and organizations. Across Japan and Southeast Asia, businesses use tonari to overcome language and cultural barriers, and improve hiring and retention abroad. Startups in Japan, Europe, and the US are using portals to expand globally, access new markets and partners, and reduce business travel and emissions. Universities, incubators, and co-working spaces use tonari to strengthen communities, share more, and spark new collaboration. We'd love for you to celebrate these launches with us! Visit our freshly updated website for new videos and details about tonari.
Pradhumn Vijayvargiya
@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?
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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!
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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. :)
HackerQED
Just like Doraemon’s Anywhere Door, the video demo looks good. Besides, it would be good for remote teams, as people can do a meeting or team-building event just like face to face.
Yanlin Wu
Congrats on the launch! It feels like communicating with teammates face to face even though they are not in the same place.
toniko
Wow, tonari sounds like the future of communication! This could really change the game for remote work and virtual events. Does it have high network requirements?
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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.
Rizky Ge
@alisaun @alvaroarregui congrats on the launch! This could really change the game for remote work and virtual events.
Alvaro Nuevo Tokyo
Maker
@alisaun @rizkyge Thank you very much!
Kyrylo Silin
Hey Taj, I'm curious about the claim of true eye contact in video communication. How exactly does tonari achieve this? Many video call solutions struggle with this aspect due to camera placement. Regarding the sub-100ms latency, how does tonari maintain this over long distances or with varying internet speeds? Congrats on the launch!
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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.
Zevanya Vaneca
Congrats on this exiting launch!!Tonari seems like a great solution for bringing people closer together!! i wish all the best for Tonari on the future💗
Olivia Rose Thompson
Congrats on the launch! tonari sounds super promising. The idea of real eye-to-eye contact through portals is a game changer for remote collaboration. Good luck with everything! 🙌
Asher Dorian Thorne
Congrats on the launch! The concept of bridging distance like this is super intriguing. Just curious, do you plan to expand tonari portals to more regions outside Asia anytime soon?Would love to see it closer to home.
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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
tjian
Congrats on the launch, Tonari team! 🎉 The new free-standing option and location hopping features sound like game-changers for remote communication. The ability to have life-sized, ultra low latency interactions with true eye contact is something we’ve all been waiting for. It's amazing to see how Tonari is bridging the gap and making distant collaborations feel natural and effortless. I’m excited to see how this will transform not just business communication, but also educational and personal connections. Keep up the fantastic work! 🚀
Ditarth Desai
Congrats on this impressive launch! Tonari brings a whole new level of realism and immersion to communication.
Nikola Djordjevic
Congrats on this exciting launch! Tonari seems like a great solution for bringing people closer together, no matter the distance. Wishing you all the best! 👏
Piyush Tiwari
This is impressive. Glad to a Doraemon's Anywhere door in real life. Love the Concept. Would definitely get a combo version for my family and friends. The best part is you can connect to anyone, Anywhere and moreover it supports zoom. That's interesting. I'm disheartened to see Tanori on #3. I WISH IT WINS THE PRODUCT OF THE DAY AWARD
Tony Carter
This is absolutely groundbreaking! 🌟 Making tonari portals free-standing and enabling location hopping is a real game changer. Solving the curse of distance with such an elegant, high-fidelity solution is impressive. I love how tonari bridges the gap between convenience and meaningful human connection. Kudos for creating something so intuitive and impactful that can be used by everyone from toddlers to executives. Can't wait to see tonari portals become a staple everywhere. Congratulations on these incredible launches! 🎉
Vanshika Kalshetti
Congratulations on the launch. This is so interesting!
yhm_dev_
Congrats on the incredible update, Tonari team! 🎉 The introduction of the free-standing option and location hopping feature is a game-changer. Your commitment to solving the curse of distance with such high-fidelity, low-latency communication is truly inspiring. The potential to bring people closer, whether for business or personal connections, is immense. Can't wait to see Tonari portals become ubiquitous and transform how we interact across distances. Keep up the fantastic work! 🚀 #Innovation #NextGenTech
Astried Herera
congrats for the launch🥰 thats really impressive for our better future..!!
Mitia
Awesome concept! This could be a game changer for remote work and virtual events. Congrats for the launch!
Aris Nakos
This is a cool story. Congratulations on the launch. why not holograms though ? Are they still more expensive than large panels ?
Taj Campbell
Hunter
@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.
Nippon Viajero
Congratulations 🎉 So proud of the tonari team! This world needs more innovative human connection friendly technology. If you're a company with multiple locations you must invest in a tonari.