Consciousness-transporting avatar among candidates for this year's XPrize
The Limitless Travel ANA Avatar may become this years XPrize winner with its AI-empowered avatar. The creators have combined teleportation with universal translators by transferring the users consciousness to a remote avatar by connecting to all the senses in their body, allowing the user to see, hear, talk, feel and move via the avatar. The ANA Avatar could be used for remote medicine, creating an army of remote first responders or allowing surgeons to use silicon assistants from far away.
It's 2025, and you need to check on production in Tokyo. But you don't book a flight—jetlag is so last century. You go online, rent an AI-empowered avatar located in Japan, slip into a full body haptic and motion-capture suit, and transport your consciousness overseas instead.

While that might sound like something out of the movies, it could become a reality if XPrize judges deem it worthy of their funds. The Limitless Travel ANA Avatar(Opens in a new window) is one of nine teams vying to be selected as the next XPrize, and PCMag got a sneak peek at a Thursday press preview in California.

The brainchild of Peter Diamandis, the XPrize Foundation is a nonprofit that hosts competitions to fund ideas that will benefit humanity. There are several XPrize categories, including the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize, but this weekend, organizers are gathering on the West Coast for the XPrize Visioneers 2016 Summit, sponsored by the Roddenberry Foundation.

For the last six months, nine teams of Visioneers have been working on potential XPrizes that tackle cancer, ALS, empathy, water, housing, nutrition, and transportation. This weekend, each team is sharing their proposals with more than 200 mentors who evaluate and critique their ideas. At the end of the weekend, a team (or teams) will be selected to become an official XPrize. (Update: The ANA Avatar, as well as the cancer and ALS projects were selected as "ready for launch" by XPrize.)

The Limitless Travel Avatar covers the transportation arm of the competition. Team Avatar, sponsored by All Nippon Airways (ANA), invited the press for an early look.

"As both a fan—and a writer on Star Trek—I see great parallels between what I'm doing with the ANA Avatar XPrize, particularly with teleportation and universal translators," team leader Harry "Doc" Kloor told PCMag. "Going somewhere is one thing, but being able to talk and understand when you get there is another.

"So we've addressed both [things]. You will be able to go anywhere, but instead of using your [body], you'll move your consciousness through connecting up all your senses in your body [to the remote avatar], to see, to hear, to talk, to feel, to move—it'll be you."

In a demonstration, Professor Susumu Tachi showed off Telesar V, the latest iteration after decades of research into what he's termed "telexistence."

"Telesar stands for Telexistence Surrogate Anthropomorphic Robot, and it was made in my Tachi Lab at the University of Tokyo," Tachi told PCMag. "We brought this model over from Japan for this presentation; the end effectors came in our hand luggage and the main body flew cargo."

The demo was fascinating. One of Tachi-san's students was already strapped into some gear that was synced with the Telesar V robot body. As the student moved and interacted with Professor Tachi, we could see on the screen what the student—and the robot avatar—experienced in tandem. Essentially whatever the student wanted the robot to say and do, it did. It was quite something.

Next up, robot creator Hiroshi Ishiguro from Osaka University's Intelligent Robotics Laboratory and two ANA flight attendants wheeled U, his latest robot, on the stage. Everyone at the press preview peered in closely; U, also dressed as an ANA air flight attendant, moved and gave the audience a small smile. You could hear a collective gasp. Not only was U pretty (said in a non-objectifying manner; just an aesthetic observation), but she looked and acted, well, really REAL. Spooky.

Then one of the Avatar XPrize team members remotely operated U, and the illusion was briefly shattered. The personality coming through U was clearly human—which is the point of the Avatar XPrize, after all—but we sort of wanted U to speak for herself, just to see what she is like. Still, the proof of concept worked, at least from 12 feet away.

A video posted by sophia stuart (@teamgloria)(Opens in a new window) on Sep 29, 2016 at 5:51pm PDT

If it sounds like something you've already seen in a movie then you must have caught Bruce Willis in 2009's Surrogates, the one where he heads to his utility room, straps himself into the souped-up recliner, and operates his Botoxed avatar (with a questionable haircut) IRL. But while Willis's character had his own custom-made cyber self, ANA Avatars will follow an "Uber-style" rental model. You don't have to own the avatar, you just pay a fee for a temporary life form that is already physically where you need to be.

There are very altruistic aims behind the ANA Avatar XPrize entry. Remote medicine, for example, could allow surgeons to use a silicon assistant that transmits their every move. Or an army of remote first responders could instantly be deployed to a disaster zone.

The big question, however, is why an airline would sponsor something that could reduce the number of people taking flights? But think about it. If you don't have to worry about being a people mover, you can focus resources on transporting consciousness into robots. People don't pay for plane tickets, they pay for time spent with these avatars.

On the plus side, if none of us have to do back-breaking, mind-numbing business travel anymore, the notion of travel as a forbidden pleasure returns. Welcome to the new jet set life courtesy of the forthcoming Limitless Travel Avatar XPrize.