Watch This Tearful Reunion Of A Mother And Her Deceased Child In VR

Four years ago, Jang Ji-sung’s beloved daughter Nayeon died at the age of seven of an incurable disease. With VR technology, the mother has a chance to see her deceased child again, in the virtual world.

A few days ago, Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation made public a documentary named “I Met You,” recording the reunion of Jang Ji-sung and her daughter with flashings of the virtual and the real world.

In a setting, the mother wore haptic gloves and a VR headset with a background of a green screen. A few seconds later, she and her daughter met, held hands, and had a birthday party together.

The reunion, as you might have guessed, was tearful. Jang busted to tears right after the virtual Nayeon while her husband and two other children watched the whole thing happened with great sorrow.

Jang said that it was like a paradise. She had what she had always dreamed of, seeing her poor daughter again. The reunion was short but happy, she shared.

As stated by Aju Business Daily, it took the production team eight months to develop the scene. They designed the background after the park Nayeon and her mother used to visit and captured the motions of a child actor, which they used as a model for the deceased girl’s movements in the virtual world.

Everything is challenging and the outcome is not perfect, at least not as realistic as what we expect to see. However, it is real enough to move a mother to tear.

Creating a park and a virtual Nayeon required a team of experts’ effort for months. But maybe someday, we might have a platform that allows us to upload footage of our loved ones to see them again or say the goodbye we have never had the chance to say.

However, the impact of this technology is unpredictable. Some people might find the closure they desire, but some might get addicted to this virtual world and keep coming back to it, as they find it hard to let their deceased loved ones go.

What people fear most here is whether this technology will go far beyond the VR recreation of humans. What if experts start to recreate androids with traits of a dead person, like in “Black Mirror?”

Many startups have embraced the idea as we speak. What they do is to gather data of people, both living and dead to make “digital avatars.” Some have even built robot clones of those who have gone.

What the team of experts aimed at with “I Met You” is positive, giving the grieving mother the chance to say farewell to her daughter. This is like us flipping through photos of our deceased loved ones to recall memories of them. Ultimately, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to learn to accept that the person is truly gone.

According to Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton, if you could accept the death of a loved one, there was nothing unethical about reuniting with them in a VR world.

However, this kind of technology calls for strict regulations. If we stand by and do nothing, startups will develop the tech and allow people to see their loved ones again, of course at a cost, without consideration for how that might affect their customers. A suggestion might be to allow those have been cleared by psychologists only.

The effects are unpredictable and we need regulations fast before things get out of hands.

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