La Guardia Airport’s newest employee, a young woman named Marie, made quite an impression during her first day on the job. Airport managers smiled as they watched the blue-eyed, six-foot-tall blonde with apple-red cheeks stand in front of new arrivals and pleasantly explain where they could find the baggage claim and the taxi stands. Her bosses did not even mind when she twiddled her thumbs and rolled her eyes when no one was around.
But Tom Bosco, the airport’s general manager, conceded that for all her attributes, Marie was a little two-dimensional. “She never complains, she’s pretty, she’s got a good personality,” he said. “She’s a little bit shallow though.”
Marie is an avatar, a life-size image of a woman digitally broadcast from a projector onto an inch-thick glass screen coated with a special film, said Luis Vega, 39, the vice president of Parabit Systems, the company that built Marie. The device uses motion sensors to prompt Marie’s ninety-second script whenever anyone comes within thirty feet of her.
Marie stopped many travelers in their tracks, and some walked a circle around her to see how she worked. Others took photos. “I thought it was really a person at first glance,” said Alex Reiss, 21, a student from Wading River, on Long Island, who took a cellphone video of Marie first from the front, and then from the side.
Max Simon, a fifty-year-old lawyer from Santa Barbara, California, said he stopped to watch Marie because he felt she was the newest, most visible step toward a more technologically advanced future. “It’s like something out of Star Wars,” he said. “It’s like the first version of a flat-screen television.”
An identical avatar, named Libby, was unveiled at Newark Liberty International Airport late last month, and a third will be unveiled at Kennedy Airport, Bosco said.
Each avatar costs sixty thousand dollars. Officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airports, will gauge public response over the next few months and may install as many as five more, he said.
Bosco said that, by giving basic airport information, such as terminal and restroom locations, Marie will help ease the workload on the airport’s flesh-and-blood staff. “She’s not replacing anybody, she’s supplementing the existing force of customer care representatives,” Bosco said.
Still, in an era of air travel in which speaking to a live customer service agent on the phone is both complicated and time consuming, some see Marie as a harbinger of a more automated airport experience. “This is another step toward avoiding having contact with a real person at the airport,” said Jeremy Kempton, 68, a retired teacher from Glen Cove, New York, who watched Marie while he waited to meet his son.
Marie tended to draw crowds of men and children, while many women walked right past her. One woman, who declined to give her name, said she would be more likely to pay attention to an avatar “if it looked like David Beckham instead”.
A few airport employees also looked at Marie with some suspicion. “I’m astonished with this, but are they going to replace us with them?” asked Jeanne Garcia, 45, a customer service director for United Airlines.
Nearby, Debra Roberts, an assistant general manager for United Airlines, watched Marie for a few minutes and then turned and walked away. “I’m going to go to work now,” she said. “Because I’m not virtual.”
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