Stumbling around the news articles from this past week, I found this:
http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/may/21/avatars-assist-area-airports/
The article is about customer service technology, being installed in airports. The Avatars:
will be seen on a device that is a life-sized flat screen in the shape of a woman. She will dispense flight information and tips about services like shuttle bus and taxi pick-ups. It activates when a customer approaches.
Thoughts. I remember several years ago when a new multi level parking garage was built on campus. For the first year or so, there was an actual person working at the ticket pay both when you exited the garage. The garage was a 24 hour garage, so, there was always someone there. Fast forward two years: the human attendees, are replaced with ticket pay kiosks. You still get a ticket when you enter, but have to manual feed your ticket into the machine and pay before you are able to leave the garage. These machines would get jammed from the paper tickets, only accepted cash and exact change. The technology used at the exits now, would also get jammed from the paper tickets. The bar wouldn’t raise and back ups actually occurred inside the garage because cars couldn’t get past the exit stand. It didn’t matter if you had paid for your ticket or not. Usually a help button, linked to the campus safety office allowed a third party to raise the exit bar and let you out if one of the other technologies failed.
So Avatars…will replace actual people at the air port. It may not happen now, or in the next several years, but just reading the article means the future is now here. What I mean by future is technology. Technology replaces the human interaction.
chossygrl 