Imagine you wake up in the morning and make some breakfast for you and your spouse who is lounging in their armchair still dressed in a morning robe. It's a normal day and you get ready to head off to work, you wave goodbye and they blow a kiss back but in reality, your spouse has been dead for many years and the companion you ate breakfast with was a virtual reality simulation.
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A virtual reality that is so seamlessly integrated with our own may not be so far away and the idea of death may be rewritten along with it. A company could gather information through analyzing torrents of data about your deceased family member. Things like voice, gait, idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and habits may all be compiled into a digital version of your spouse.
Waving goodbye to a deceased family member, or coming home to a long-lost pet greeting you at the door, all are seemingly impossible fantasies that may actually be possible. Already, virtual reality devices like Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are able to make an unnervingly convincing approximation of reality or fantasy all within a virtual world.
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Users can experience a relaxing and beautiful paradise or be terrified by horrors, others may just want to experience another part of the world through Google Earth.
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With the advancement of cell phone technology into the current state of advanced smartphones, companies are looking to quantify and collect massive amounts of online data which can help them create an accurate portrait of that person's behavior, thoughts, feelings, preferences, habits and much more.
The idea that one day soon virtual reality companies will mesh these massive pools of data into animated examples of deceased people is not that far-fetched. Saying goodbye to a loved one may never be the same, sure you will be sad when they die but at any time you will be able to hang out with and share memories with a simulated approximation that is difficult to distinguish from the real one.
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It is quite possible we are closer than we realize to having simulations of deceased people, companies like Google are already looking to introduce the virtual world to the physical one.
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Source: http://bigthink.com/aeon-ideas/how-virtual-reality-will-bring-our-loved-ones-back-from-the-dead
