Nope, this is not a meme. You can resurrect dead people in the metaverse. Maybe not the ones that have passed away up to this day, but the ones who are connected to the metaverse.
In this blog post, I will discuss the concept, then the Netflix series Better Than Us, Black Mirror (episode: Be right back), the metaverse Somnium Space, a Korean documentary called Meeting You, and end with some final remarks.
So the idea is simple. Just as you can have a voice recording, photo, or video of deceased people, you can also have their representations in a more immersive VR experience. This can be a realistic avatar and this person's voice. Yes, in that sense, the title is a misnomer; you do not bring back people from other worlds (pun intended). Instead, you create a digital/virtual representation of the person. You can recreate that person in several ways. First, you can have a massive pile of photos, body measurements, videos, and maybe do some motion recording. Then you will need talented artists and designers to put them all together.
As you can see, this path is expensive and requires much effort. Because you are capturing the physical intricacies of the person and then trying to convert this to digital. The second option involves the metaverse. If you are already connected to the metaverse with a complete set of devices audio- motion recording, finger tracking, and haptic suit, and if you spend at least a few hours a day doing different activities in the metaverse, your presence in that metaverse can be recreated. In other words, your avatar can do what you did not do and say what you did not speak but would be likely to do and likely to say. Not like generic sentences or rigid, monotonous movements but more like natural, arbitrary, and reactive. So it is not just recording what you do. Although this is not an easy feat, it is a matter of the amount of data and sophistication of the machine learning algorithms you have at hand.
Black Mirror
Black Mirror is my favorite TV show; I highly recommend watching it. Very brief summary: Ash and Martha are partners. Ash dies in a car accident. Martha is sorrowful. Sara is a friend of Martha. Sara signs Martha up for some resurrection service where they recreate real-life robots (called Ash* from now on) using immense amounts of data. Martha protests but then accepts out of curiosity. Martha feeds Ash’s digital data into the algorithm and starts speaking to Ash* on the phone*.* At some point, Martha’s phone breaks, and she gets emotional, but Ash* relieves her by saying he is in the cloud. Then, she signs up for the premium service, the embodied Ash*, that walks, talks and f*cks like her deceased partner would do.
Better Than Us
Svetlana’s father owns a humanoid robot company. Svetlana is married to Viktor Pavlovich, and their son had deceased at a very early age. Viktor Pavlovich seems to have gotten over the loss, but Svetlana still struggles. The company made a child robot to relieve her pain. Svetlana spends time with her son* in robot form, and it is much easier for her to adapt than Martha from Black Mirror. After all, you would expect a lower cognitive sophistication from a child, so it is easier to model a kid than an adult.
Meeting You
This brings me to the Korean documentary Meeting You. This time we see the VR version of the same phenomenon, which is much easier to achieve but still a GREAT challenge. This woman lost her daughter at the age of 7. The documentary is about the reunion of the mother and the daughter. This is a unique use case of VR. We always collected stuff from our deceased ones. Even before photos were invented, people gathered the letters and the belongings of their loved ones. Then it was photos and videos, and now we have a 3D immersive experience as a piece of memory or as a souvenir. How they achieved that? First, a child model has to go under 3D scanning to capture the movement and replicate it in VR, and then for the audio; they gathered samples from child actresses with a similar voices.
Somnium Space
Still feels distant and not scalable nor production-ready. You cannot do such a thing in the near future, right? Well, you can. Somnium Space, an NFT-based blockchain metaverse, is planning to launch its opt-in, paid Live Forever feature. Users who decide to have their data recorded can then have their avatars recreated, free-floating in the metaverse. This is only possible with immense amounts of data. Fortunately, a VR metaverse has wealthy data, audio, haptics, finger-tracking, places you hang out, things you stare at, how you place yourself in the space, and whatnot.
Final Remarks
Here, I presented a provoking use case of extended reality: resurrecting the dead in different forms and shapes. VR could help process traumatizing events or simulate events with high emotional salience, such as giving a presentation to a large audience or preparing for a major sports event. One should dive into academic literature to see if that is feasible.
What do you think, would you like to have such an experience? Would you meet avatars of your ceased loved ones if you had the chance to? Would you consent to Somnium Space to gather these data and be able to reproduce you even without you for your loved ones? I will be down in the comment section.
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