Your next vacation can be virtual
The largest Japanese airline is guessing that the future of travel will not travel at all. Last month a married couple from the Oita prefecture exchanged a robot named Avatar, driven by his daughter hundreds of miles away in Tokyo. Made by ANA Holdings Inc., it looks like a vacuum cleaner with a connected iPad. But the screen shows her daughter's face as they chat and her wheels let her roam the house as if she were real and sitting at her parents' table. This may seem strange to an international airline. As the population ages, tourist attractions become more popular and travel abroad less sustainable. ANA and its competitors are counting on making money by keeping potential travelers at home. The "virtual journey" is of course nothing new. Storytellers, travel writers and artists have been stimulating the senses of wheelchair tourists for centuries. Only in recent decades have frequent and safe journeys - especially abroad - been made accessible to the poor, lar