I, Robot

YOU are separated from your family, with no means of getting to them physically. You miss a call from them in the dead of the night. When you try to reach them again, nobody picks up. Panic ensues.

Vancouver-based Tan Tingxi never has that problem. He simply logs on to the remote-control robot docked in his parent's Singapore home. It is his eyes and ears as he directs its movements between rooms. When he finally locates his folks, he communicates with them through the robot, too.

"You can think of telepresence as video calls on wheels, but it is more than that. The human-height of the unit, the tilting neck that allows the user to change his perspective... it all makes the experience more emotive and natural. And it beats paying neighbours to keep an eye on your family when you are far away!" says the Singaporean chief product officer and co-founder of OhmniLabs, a Silicon Valley-based telepresence robotics company.