Cremains of the Day: A Digital Version of a Deceased Self

In the future, mourners may interact with beloved deceased through virtual reality. Project Elysium is the brainchild of game designers from Australia, and proposes to use a headset like Oculus Rift or HTC Vive as the gateway to a 3-D experience of the beloved who will be “inhabited” by an AI version of themselves. From the Express article:

The team describes the software as “a therapeutic experience aimed to help the people left behind deal with and work through their grief”.

“Virtual sanctuary [is] a service where we work with clients to create 3D models of their deceased loved ones,” the Paranormal Games team added…

“Through the window that we create, people will now have another life raft to hold onto in the ocean of sorrow and loss…

Project Elysium is currently in development as part of the Oculus' Mobile VR Jam 2015, a competition which pits rival virtual reality  projects against one another for a maximum of  $1,020,000 (£660,000) in available prizes.

Read more at the link, and see the build video submitted for the competition. Given the extremely 3-D approach of another recent memory box, is inviting an AI-operated version of the deceased into your brain more or less intimate?

Comments

  1. Joe Brosnan

    This looks straight out of Black Mirror!

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