Telepresence is an idea that's cropped up in science fiction and real robotics research for many years. It's a natural fit for modern VR technology and there's a lot of development going on these days. Tom Simonite of NewScientist writes, "Technology that lets a human "inhabit" the body of a distant robot for remote exploration is being tested in Germany. The operator wears a VR headset to see out of twin cameras on the bot's head, which tracks the human's head movements. The robots arm and hand are controlled using a haptic interface that gives force feedback to allow manipulation of objects. The whole assembly is mounted on a moveable platform so that when the human walks around the bot does too." The research is being done by Angelika Peer, Ulrich Unterhinninghofen and Martin Buss. For more details, see the Multimodal Telepresence and Teleaction project at Technische Universität München.