(Newswire.net — February 12, 2020) — Nayeon the seven-year-old daughter of Jang Ji-sung, has died of an incurable disease. Three years later, the South Korean mother reunited with Nayeon in a virtual world created for a television documentary, PC Gamer reports.
Munhwa, the leading Korean Broadcasting Company shared a video clip from a special documentary called “I Met You,” with footage between the real world and the virtual.
The video shows a Korean mother Yang reunited with her deceased Daughter Nayeon. At first, Yang stood in front of a massive green screen while wearing a VR headset and some sort of gloves with sensors. Eventually she and her daughter talk, hold hands, even have a birthday party with a candle cake.
Reuniting in virtual reality, as one might expect, is extremely emotional. Young seems to start crying the moment she sees the virtual Nayeon, while the rest of the family – Nayeon’s father, brother and sister – look skeptical, but emotional.
“Maybe it’s a real paradise,” Young said after the virtual reality reunion.
According to PC Gamer who quoted Aju Business Daily, the production team spent eight months on this project. They designed a virtual park in which the mother and daughter meet, and used motion capture technology to capture the movements of a child actor that they could later use as a model for the virtual Nayeon.
The procedure is not simple, and the final product may not be perfect, but now we have the technology to “revive” the dead in virtual reality, convincingly enough to make their loved ones cry, producers said. The implications of this are impossible to predict, they add.
Several startups are laying the groundwork for the VR reunion idea, gathering data on living and dead people so they can create “digital avatars” from them. Other companies are already building robotic clones of real humans.
The essence of a virtual reality reunion is a positive thing – it’s more like scrolling through a photo album of the twenty-first century and less like that sci-fi episode of “Black Mirror” – people fully accept that their loved ones are no longer alive.
While psychologists say the grief period should be over in 6 months and recommend a medical therapy if grief continues, it actually becomes a part of us that never leaves, thus we don’t need medication. Moving on, however, sometimes is harder and some say that a VR reunion with our beloved ones that are not longer with us is not helping but could prolong the period of grief.