The transformative travel technologies on the horizon, and why they’re so important…

Thirty years ago, you had to walk into a travel agency to book a trip, present a paper ticket to an airline agent and buckle up with a paper book. These days, things look very different. You can head to the airport with your suitcase automatically following behind you. In-flight, you can enjoy VR meditation apps to reduce flight anxiety, or receive push notifications reminding you to stay well-rested, when to stretch, and when to hydrate in order to prevent jet lag. When you arrive, a kiosk might welcome you – and if you didn’t quite catch what it was saying, you could ask Google Translate. 

That is, once we can travel again. Since the pandemic hit, many of us have spent a lot of time staring out of the window, dreaming of the possibility of traveling the world, meeting new people, and experiencing new things. And we have good reason: outside of pandemic times, research shows that our health and our ability to explore the world are firmly connected. 

Travel is good for our physical health because it can mean more fresh air, more exercise, and reduced stress. In fact, one study even found that women who vacation more than twice a year show a significantly lower risk of experiencing a heart attack than those who travel every six years. Meanwhile men who do not take an annual vacation, show a 20 percent higher risk of death and 30 percent greater risk of heart disease. 

Travel is good for our mental health, too. According to a study cited in Forbes, even just booking a trip can boost our happiness. Once we arrive at our destination, studies find that cortisol levels can decrease within just days. On top of that, travel boosts our patience and mental resilience long-term, meaning that it can help with our mental health even once we’re home. 

Then there are the benefits to our creativity: “Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth, and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms,” explains Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School who has authored a number of studies into the links between creativity and international travel. Galinsky’s work has also found that experiencing other cultures can actually help us innovate. 

Whoever we are, wherever we are, travel is good for us. But if you’re reading all of the above, and thinking, “hang on, travel is not affordable and accessible to everyone,” then we’re with you. In America alone, 29% of adults have never been abroad and 71 % say it’s too expensive to leave the country. Meanwhile less than half of Americans hold a passport. But if travel makes us physically and mentally healthier, shouldn’t everyone have the opportunity? 

Part of the revolution we’ve witnessed over the past thirty years has been about not just streamlining travel, but democratizing it, and this poses the question of where we could be in another thirty. At XPRIZE, we believe that avatars are a key technology that will blow travel wide open. Harnessing and combining cutting edge AR, VR, and AI technologies, along with advanced haptics. Avatars will make it possible for us to feel like we are in a remote location, in real time, from thousands of miles away. 

So, how will it work? According to Dilip Patel, one of the judges on the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, one scenario is that we can expect our avatar to be a human-scale and friendly-faced humanoid robot that roams our remote location for us. “The avatar is equipped with the vision, tactile, audio, smell, and other sensors that capture the richness of the environment that needs to be communicated back to the operator,” says Dilip. 

To operate it, we might visit a control kiosk, he explains, where we slip on an exoskeletal type suit to communicate body language, plug into vision sensors to convey our facial expressions and gaze, auditory sensors to communicate voice, and use a display interface that provides a 3D visual of the remote environment. Then, we can go ahead and use our avatar to explore environments ranging from deserts to rainforests, picking up the sand or the soil and actually feeling it running through our fingers.

If all of this sounds far-fetched, it should. This type of realism will require reliable infrastructure at both ends, and the advancement of haptics technology to convincingly encompass environmental elements like temperature and humidity, wind, and smell. Once this technology has been realized, there are still some steps that need to be taken for it to reach the market. Yet the ubiquity of avatars in our lives is not just possible, it’s on its way. With it, we could transcend pandemics, traveling without spreading or catching viruses, and transcend time limitations, traveling vast distances that might have otherwise required a long-haul flight. Global travel over just a weekend — democratizing the physical and mental health benefits that come with travel. 

Yet, while these benefits apply to everyone, there are those that avatar tech can more specifically benefit too. People living with disabilities that make it difficult to travel will potentially be able to use avatar technologies to take trips more regularly, and for elderly people, avatars will provide a way to stay connected and travel further into old age in an increasingly isolated world. As for school children, avatar tech can create a means to improve education – ANA already has an avatar museum program whereby kids can explore remote museums without leaving their hometowns. “For field trips, we’ve been utilizing large monitors, with the kids taking turns operating the avatar. This set-up creates a special experience that everybody can share,” says Kevin Kajitani, of ANA’s Digital Design Lab. 

As well as the human benefits, points out Dilip, emerging avatar technologies could have huge benefits for our planet. COVID-19 and the accompanying Zoom revolution has shown us the extent of our unnecessary travel – particularly when it comes to business travel. During the peak of the pandemic, a mass grounding of flights saw CO2 emissions from aviation cut by up to 60%. Avatars can contribute to this reduction by providing a viable alternative to personal and business travel by car and air. On top of that, they spell good news for more direct conservation efforts, Dilip adds, because they mean that we can reduce foot traffic at world heritage sites and other sites of natural beauty. More people can travel with less damage to the environment – everyone wins. 

Right now, only an estimated 6% of the world’s population travels each year. But in the future, school kids without passports could hop over to the Galapagos Islands to see a tortoise up close and personal, retirees with chronic health problems could stand at the foot of Machu Picchu and look up at it before beginning to climb, and those living with disabilities that make it difficult to travel, could swim with fish in the Great Barrier Reef. The world might seem far away, especially now – in the midst of a pandemic – but with avatars, it’s not as far as we might think.