One tech firm allows you to create an 'immortal' avatar of your loved one through a virtual reality filming process that costs up to $50,000. Photograph: Getty
There are cheaper options available in China where several companies now sell interactive digital replicas of loved ones. The price has come down from about $3,000 to a few hundred dollars, according to a report last month in O’Meara’s involvement with the conference is part of a four-year research project backed by the Irish Research Council called From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality. It’s a long name for what is essentially a bid to use film studies to better understand how VR and artificial intelligence will shape our future lives.
There is a parallel between some of the criticism of AI today and claims made in the early days of cinema that movies are tools of deception. “Audiences learn all of the film grammar of close up, shot, reverse shot” and this helps them to critically judge what they are seeing, O’Meara says. Similarly, with VR “we can see the seams of the technology ... and we can see when things are ‘off’. As of now that generally prevents complete belief in the fake.
One question being considered as part of the research project is whether the history of screen can offer lessons for regulating a technology like VR. Returning to the question of whether to resurrect a deceased loved one in virtual form, she asks: “who can give that consent?” As to whether there is a market for it, O’Meara says: “At the moment these technologies are prohibitively expensive for most people ...but as they become more embedded or dominant – like with laptops or smartphones – they will become cheaper and more people will have access to them.