Japan's biggest airline is betting that the future of travel isn't traveling at all.
For the last month, a married couple in Oita Prefecture has been interacting with a robot — called an Avatar — that's controlled by their daughter hundreds of kilometers away in Tokyo.
Made by ANA Holdings Inc., it looks like a vacuum cleaner with an iPad attached. But the screen displays the daughter's face as they chat, and its wheels let her trundle about the house as though she's really there, and even join her parents at the dinner table.