An airport in France is experimenting with "virtual" boarding agents in a bid to jazz up its terminals with 21st century avatars who always smile, don't need breaks and never go on strike.

The pilot project at Paris' Orly airport began last month, and has so far been met with a mix of amusement and surprise by travellers, who frequently try to touch and speak with the strikingly life-like video images that greet them and direct them to their boarding gate.

The images materialise seemingly out of thin air when a boarding agent, a real live human, presses a button to signal the start of boarding.

They are actually being rear-projected onto a human shaped silhouette made of plexiglass. Three actual airport boarding agents were filmed in a studio to create the illusion, which the airport hopes will be more eye-catching and easier for passengers to understand than traditional electronic display terminals.

"Bonjour! I invite you to go to your boarding gate. Paris Airports wishes you a bon voyage," the image appears to say, while the name of the destination flashes in front of him.

Airport authority AdP came up with the idea for what it calls "2-D holograms" earlier this year, when it was brainstorming ways to modernise Hall 40, one of the dozens of boarding gates at Paris' second airport, south of the capital.

"Children like it, it's fun. They're attracted to it and try to play with it," said Didier Leroy, the airport's director of operations. "There's finally very few who find it useless or just a gizmo."

The technology behind the images was developed by a Paris audiovisual marketing agency, L'Oeil du Chat. Similar virtual agents are in place in airports in London and Manchester since earlier this year.