Just a few days after actor Gerard Depardieu was caught short on a flight to Dublin, Orly airport in Paris is giving French travellers another reason to be stopped in their tracks.
The airport has created what it calls virtual boarding agents, essentially 2D digital holograms which guide passengers to gates when a flight is ready (who, as AP puts it cheekily, do not strike).
The project began in July this year and works by beaming a digitised image of three different agents onto the back of a piece of thin plexi-glass in one of the departure areas in the Parisian airport. Each holds a placard with the name of the destination and wishes passengers a "bon voyage".
It is the third airport (after similar facilities in London and Manchester) to be fitted with such kit by Paris-based tech marketing agency L'Oeil du Chat.
Aeroports de Paris, the company which runs the Orly, Le Bourget and Charles de Gaulle airports, is certainly of the more progressive users of technology, having also recently introduced a free iPhone application to use the GPS within the handset to guide passengers around each of the locations and provide detailed information on available services.
The virtual boarding agent project will run until the end of 2011, by which time passengers may have got used to the new staffers in the departure lounges.
Apparently the agents smile pleasantly and look around the room as passengers walk by to the aircraft, leading some children in the terminal to trying to talk to the agent - with, obviously, no response.
Presumably, interaction will come later...