Is it Creepy? Or is it what technology wants us to accept?

For those who watch Netflix a lot, this a real-life version of something that can be a direct lift from Netflix's highly acclaimed “Black Mirror” episode Be Right Back.

On Thursday, Feb 6th, 2020, the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation shared a clip from the special documentary, titled “I Met You,” on its YouTube page, where a South Korean mother, Jang Ji-sung was reunited with her daughter Nayeon in a playground. Till this, all seems lovey-dovey, an awesome display of love and bonding between a mother and daughter. But why is it making the media go ga-ga about this entire thing? Why the digital world is sitting up and taking notice of this regular affair? Why are so much discussion and debate happening in the technology world regarding such a normal happening?

Well, it is just that, Jang Ji-sung had lost her seven-year-old daughter Nayeon to an incurable disease in 2016. And now, after more than three years, the South Korean mother was reunited with her daughter in a virtual world created for a televised documentary named "I Met You" where we could see that the footage was toggled between the “real world” and the virtual one.

In the Real world setting, Jang Ji was standing in front of a giant green screen while wearing both a VR headset and wearing some sort of haptic gloves. While, in the VR world, she and her daughter talk, hold hands, show affection and even had a birthday party.

The VR reunion, as everyone expected was extremely emotional. Jang started crying the moment she saw the virtual Nayeon, while the rest of the family — Nayeon’s father, and her siblings — watched the entire reunion with a tear in their eyes.

“Maybe it’s a real paradise,” Jang said of the reunion in VR, “I met Nayeon, who called me with a smile, for a very short time, but it’s a very happy time. I think I’ve had the dream I’ve always wanted.”

According to Aju Business Daily, the production team had spent eight long months on the project. They designed a virtual park that Jian and her daughter had previously visited in the real world. They used (MoCap) motion capture technology to record the movements of a child actor and later used it as a model for virtual Nayeon.

To say the least, the process didn't appear simple and the final product was also not perfect, but now we can safely say that we have a technology to recreate the dead in VR that is so convincing that it can move the loved ones to tears.

Though it has taken an entire team of experts to produce “I Met You,” but is the time near that from an online platform anyone can upload footage of a deceased loved one and then interact with a virtual version of that person?

Going through the humongous amount of diverse comments and tweets it left me to wonder how much impact will such a VR meeting with the dead will have on the grieving process? Will seeing a loved one in VR help people find closure and console and move on? Or will it make them addicted to the virtual world, spending more time in it and less in the real one?

Will this be a definite direction where VR can take us or is it the end of it? Or is this just the first step to androids designed to mimic our dead loved ones in both appearance and personality. “Digital Avatars” of people in the virtual world is not new. Various companies are already building bot clones of real people. Although a VR reunion is a positive thing — that is, more like reminiscing older times but only time can tell if it will be that positive for a living person to fully accepting their loved one’s death after meeting them in Virtual world.

“Since you know the person is gone, you accept the virtual equivalent for what it is — a comforting vestige,” Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano told Dell Technologies. “There is nothing wrong or unethical about it.”

In my personal opinion, I think some regulation is necessary. Rather than letting everybody get a chance to interact with the virtual dead, maybe we can make the technology available only to people who’ve received a certificate of approval from a psychologist.

Story source: www.ajudaily.com | www.futurism.com