A tearful reunion between a mother and her dead daughter through advanced virtual reality for a South Korean television has become an online hit, triggering fierce debate about voyeurism and exploitation.
The footage began with the girl, who died of leukemia in 2016, emerging from behind a pile of wood in a park, as if playing a game.
“Mom, 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 toward her, wracked with emotion.
“I have missed you Na-yeon,” she told the computer-generated six-year-old, her hands moving to stroke her hair.
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 Corp 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.
“My mother unexpectedly passed away two years ago and I wish I could meet her through virtual reality,” one said.
However, media columnist Park Sang-hyun said the documentary amounted to exploitation of personal pain.
“It’s understandable a grief-stricken mother would wish to meet her late daughter. I would do the same,” he said.
“The problem lies in that the broadcaster has taken advantage of a vulnerable mother who lost a child for sake of the viewer ratings,” he added.
“If the mother had been counseled before the filming, I wonder what kind of a psychiatrist would approve this,” he said.
It took eight months of filming and programming to create the virtual Na-yeon, but the makers of the documentary said the broadcast was intended to “console the family” rather than promote virtual reality in South Korea.
Jang — who has her daughter’s name and date of birth tattooed on her arm in memory — said that she hoped the program could “console” others who had lost loved ones.
“Even though it was a very brief... I was really happy in the moment,” she wrote on her blog, which she has since turned private.
During the broadcast the two sat at a table to celebrate Na-yeon's missing birthdays, singing "happy birthday" together.
Before blowing out the candles, Na-yeon made a birthday wish: "I want my mother to stop crying."
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