Well, this story just about made my day. Scientists have figured out a way for humans and rats to interact at scale, meaning, the human’s movements control a rat-sized robot in a pen with the rat, and the rat’s movements control a human-sized “beamed” avatar. 

Professor Mandayam Srinivasan, author of the paper from the UCL Department of Computer Science and MIT, said: “Beaming is a step beyond approaches such as video conferencing which do not give participants the physical sensation of being in the same shared space, and certainly not the physical capability to actually carry out actions in that space.”

He added: “The process demonstrated here not only shows the range of our technology, but also provides a new tool for scientists, explorers or others to visit distant and alien places without themselves being placed in any kind of danger, and importantly, to be able to see animal behaviour in a totally new way — as if it were the behaviour of humans.”

The possibilities for long-distance JS Joust are outrageously good.