In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world's resources-bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the "stuff of science-fiction," teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an "avatar service platform"-a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin's eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA's support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporates, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services-for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the "ANA AVATAR" program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, "avatarin." Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations? How should they respond to the demands of this unprecedented moment in human history?

【書誌情報】

ページ数：45ページ

サイズ：A4

商品番号：HBSP-421089

発行日：2021/6/1

登録日：2021/7/12