WHat happens the first time the robot gets put in a locker. (You know it’s going to happen eventually.)
As Winchester Principal Kathleen Brachmann explains, it’s a world of difference between sitting at home alone with your books and being able to participate in classroom discussion or join your friends in the hallway for lockerside chats. “Walking down a hallway, seeing other kids,” she told the Washington Post, “you couldn’t expose somebody on a Skype session that way. It would just be like a TV screen. With this he really gets a feel, a sensation, of being there.”
Already VGos are being used by kids in New Jersey, Iowa, Wisconsin and Texas to send their personal “avatars” to school while staying safely away due to health reasons. If the rapidly growing number of telepresence robots joining the market is any indication, the number of children telecommuting through robots is likely to increase in the near future. Not to be confined to the classroom, physicians are also already using telepresence robots to be in two places at once and check up on patients that are miles away.
