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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

I saw a couple of these a while ago at London Luton airport. Personally, I found the experience profoundly dehumanizing, and thought it rather depressing to be talked to by a life-sized, talking, cardboard cut-out.

It's a neat idea for sure, but my preference is for, well, anything that doesn't look so human and yet so fake at the same time.

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I've seen these in a few airports now in the UK. They seem to be replacing the "What to do at the security area" videos. I think it's a step in the wrong direction. You lose the ability to display diagrams/symbols and understand the information from a distance or in a noisy environment (exactly like a security area at an airport). Even worse, you lose the language-agnostic benefits from a well produced demonstration video.

Their introduction is fueled by the fact that it's "obvious" that people would want to deal with human avatars, and will of course understand information better from them. Though it is in fact a poor form of dissemination for most types of information.

Yes, it seems like five 80" LCD panels running an animated loop would be much cheaper ($30K vs $180K), convey more information to more people, and be significantly less creepy.

I've also seen this in a UK airport. I did not think it was a hologram.

When I read the title, I was expecting something different: A pool of agents "beaming into" the busy hotspots from a central, remote location. E.g. If airport A is quieter than airport B, then the agents just beam into airport B.

The agent can see the person via camera, and can tell the person to place his passport in a reader that quickly scans all pages, and sends the agent an image. To stamp the passport, the agent can tell the person place page X in slot "Y", where the agent can release the stamp remotely.

Then I read about the $180k non-interactive cardboard cutouts....

It's firmly in the Uncanny Valley.

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