 We're in Miami, Florida for our semi-finals testing. We are testing 31 of our 37 semi-finalists teams to see who will move forward as finalists for the A&A Avatar XPrize. I'm personally really excited to be here at Semi-Finalist Testing. It is our first opportunity to get looks at the team's hardware, see what they've been working on for the past two and a half years, and also just to meet the teams. Necessity is a mother of invention, but here we are two and a half years or so from the inception of this competition, and it has become something that is a necessity post-pandemic or during the pandemic. Here we are seeing these amazing teams pull together these incredible innovations that they didn't even know we needed so desperately when they started this competition. All teams have approaches and different specialties that they're focused on, but really at the end of the day I think this has the ability to really transform one, how we communicate with one another, and also just transportation in general. So it's very easy in a competition like this to get lost in the technical details. Did the avatar move? Did the avatar place the puzzle piece? And so I think it's really important that we remember that this is really about how to bring two people who are at a distance into a shared physical space. And we need to focus on really interacting with that person and getting a sense, do I feel like you're here? And so I want the teams to really come out of this feeling confident that the technical stuff works. So now let's really focus on how do you build that connection? How do you build that interaction? We're going to get through semifinals with some great technical systems. But in order to have a successful finals, we're going to need to take it up to a level where we're building relationship. When you take a first look at them, they kind of look sort of simple and childish in some ways, and they are anything but. So a lot of thought has gone into these things in order to enable us to take really very complicated sort of multi-sensory interactions that we have that involve people at both ends, involve a lot of complicated technology, and break it down into parts that both the teams and we as judges can really kind of get our arms around and ask ourselves, are we achieving emotional connection? Are we able to perform the manipulations? Are we feeling safe? These things have been designed really carefully to enable us to both have a holistic experience, but also be able to connect that to really the specifics of what's going on. When I talk to people about this, they invariably say, oh, I don't think I'd want to interact with a robot. And to me, that's missing the point. It's not about interacting with a robot, it's about interacting with a person. But being able to go beyond what we do today with telephones and videoconferencing and add in this movement element, this touch element, this embodiment, it's about connecting people. And I think that's the biggest misconception is that it's not about people, it's about the robot. The robot should really recede into the background when this is all really done right and it should be about people. Being able to address more social aspects of human interaction is an excellent focus of this prize and I'm so glad that it has really been a key driver to helping roboticists think about robots in a different way. I've been able to see such a big, diverse population of people interested in this area and also all these different capabilities of robots, so it's been wonderful to see. So we designed the competition or we designed the evaluation so that the robot team only gets to train the judges for about an hour. Now some of these robots are very complex and it would take a long time to train but because that was one of the evaluation criteria, we're seeing that a lot of teams are focusing on the human factors and focusing on usability and training, which has been wonderful to see. Avatar technology will enable humans to transport their senses, their actions and their presence to a remote location in real time. In other words, you could access an avatar from anywhere in the world and feel as if you are actually where that avatar is. So you could touch, you could feel, hopefully someday you'll be able to smell, you can maneuver and go anywhere in the world that you'd like to be and either connect with somebody, potentially transport your skill set or just explore in general, right? If you just want to travel or you want to go to a distant galaxy or planet, we hope that one day avatars will enable humans to have that opportunity.