A tearful reunion between a mother and her dead daughter via advanced virtual reality for a South Korean television has become an online hit, triggering a fierce debate about voyeurism and exploitation.
The footage began with the girl – who died of leukaemia in 2016 – emerging from behind a pile of wood in a park, as if playing hide-and-seek.
“Mum, where have you been?” she asks. “I’ve missed you a lot. Have you missed me?”
Tears streaming down her face, Jang Ji-sung reached out towards her, racked with emotion.
“I have missed you Na-yeon,” she told the computer-generated six-year-old, her hands moving to stroke her hair.
But in the real world, Jang was standing in front of a studio green screen, wearing a virtual reality headset and touch-sensitive gloves, her daughter’s ashes in a locket around her neck.
At times the camera cut to Jang’s watching husband and their three surviving children, wiping away tears of their own.
A nine-minute clip of the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) documentary, I Met You, has been watched more than 13 million times in a week on YouTube.
Many viewers offered Jang their sympathy and support for the concept.
“My mother unexpectedly passed away two years ago and I wish I could meet her through virtual reality,” said one.
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