Gadgetory

transferring the human consciousness from one place to another and then controlling some kind of robot or telepresence object on the other side is the stuff of sci-fi and All Nippon Airways wants to make that a reality through its avatar XPrize we're checking out a anaise avatar presentation hundreds of visionaries voted to make this concept an official XPrize competition an avatar is basically an alternative body that you possess you put your intelligence in it your awareness in this avatar system is a enormous potential from mankind that's what I believe in if I have one in the village for instance I can have every doctor every engineer every machinist whatever you need when you need it could be there this sounds a lot like the beginnings of Skynet to me when the Terminator war comes do you want to fight that Terminator in your meat suit or do you want to fight it in your avatar body you can travel on top of Everest and also you can dive deeply into the ocean fly 2,000 meters on the very same day and if you were able to do that through the robot went to be tempted to do that by yourself average mattress I'm gonna win a hot dog eating contest of my avatar so the goal of the avatar XPrize is a contest that will bring all the makers together to create a general-purpose avatar system the whole point of our contest is to build this general-purpose avatar and by having celebrities or others do it it will get across again the full concept that this is for everyone so we finally get to play with the robot and shaking someone's hand through it was incredible but then they drop the bomb on me I get to being a robot just have no idea how excited I am about this right now so there's four pieces of equipment I have to put on in order to become the robot a giant headset a vest and two gloves with haptic feedback inside this is the super futuristic version of Edward Scissorhands to calibrate my hands to the robots hands I have to do these strange finger exercises that will tell the computer what I want the robot to do we're about to start and they say put your hands on the orbs and suddenly I have been transported to Star Trek okay you have nicked it whoa hello everybody you can see me hello the professor touches my robot hand and I can feel it in my hands because of the haptic feedback yes oh wow that's amazing then I turned my head to the right and that's when things got weird because there I was sitting five feet away oh are you here I'm having an existential crisis where am I yeah it's strange because I can see your hand moving when you move towards me so I take off the headset the gloves and the vest and I'm super bummed out because honestly I just wanted to be a robot all day but unfortunately the technology to build a true general-purpose avatar is still a little ways off so I'll wake up tomorrow morning and think the same thing that I've thought my entire adult life I wish I was a robot