A few days ago, I watched ‘I Met You’, the virtual reality human documentary. This documentary is about a mother who lost her seven-year-old daughter, Nayeon to a rare and incurable disease. After four years of separation she was able to interact with a VR version of her daughter. Thus, before watching the documentary I was wondering how meeting her daughter, conjured up by VR technology, could possibly console her mother. Actually, ‘virtual reality’ and ‘comfort’ are not compatible at all. However, the mother was greatly consoled when she was finally able to meet the child. How is it possible for her to get comforted even though she knew it was not real? Surely she would realize that it wouldn’t have been her Nayeon embodied in VR.
  Four years ago, around the age of seven, Nayeon showed some cold symptoms. Her mother thought she had a simple cold because her throat was swollen and she had a fever. However, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and a month later, she died suddenly. Nayeon’s mother was scared of Nayeon fading from her memory. In order not to forget Nayeon, her mother engraved her name and birthday on her body and she wears a necklace with Nayeon’s bone powder every day. In the documentary, Nayeon’s mother said, “I believed that if I prayed desperately, Nayeon could appear in my dreams, but she never did.” It was the mother’s earnest desire to see Nayeon once again. The mother’s desire to meet Nayeon, even in her dream, would not be much different from meeting her even in virtual reality. For a mother who desperately wants to see her daughter who she will never see again, the fact that she can meet her daughter in virtual reality seems to have been a great comfort.
  During the VR encounter Nayeon’s mother held her hand and touched her face, saying what she had wanted to say the most. She said it was heartbreaking to think that she scolded Nayeon the day she left without knowing that it was her last day. She said “If I could meet Nayeon just for a day, I would like to make her favorite seaweed soup and keep telling her ‘I love you. I’ve never forgotten you’.” With her whole heart she wishes she said “I love you” more and hugged her a lot if only she had known it was the last time. When she saw Nayeon in VR, she said, “I won’t cry. I’ll love you more instead of missing you.” responding to Nayeon’s wish “Please don’t let my mom cry.” She is fully aware that it’s not the real Nayeon. Nevertheless, she was happy to see and embrace her daughter again and convey her remaining feelings. She could laugh, cry and talk with her 3D-daughter because she wanted to say goodbye and allow her daughter to leave.
  Someone may ask how fiction can deliver true consolation. However, a lot of people collaborated to make the fictional reality. Analyzing Nayeon’s various facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice from old photographs, many people made numerous efforts to make it as realistic and close to her mother’s memory as possible. It took a long time to collect the voices of a hundred children, find similar body-shaped models, dress them in Nayeon’s clothes, teach them her gestures and superimpose her face on them. Nayeon could be remade because of people’s eagerness to make a good memory for her mother. Everyone worked on the project carefully, knowing her longing and sadness. Therefore, she could finally experience Nayeon’s voice, facial expressions, and personality in virtual reality even though she knew what she saw was fiction.
  After all, it isn’t just the VR image of Nayeon that comforts and empowers her mother. It is probably also because of the desire and efforts of many people who want to bring about warm moments of memory for Nayeon’s mother by recreating Nayeon in VR. Kim Jong-woo, producer of ‘I Met You’ commented, “In the end, I think life is a memory. Memory is what we did with people. I planned this documentary to show sincere empathy to people through technology, and nothing more.” Also, Lee Hyun-suk, VR producer said, “We participated in this program to console Nayeon’s family not to create a boom in the VR industry. Whatever way VR develops, people have to be careful, and I hope it develops in such a way that it will always consider people.” Through a VR meeting between Nayeon and her mother, we saw the possibility of VR playing a role in touching the human heart and mind. It became possible for technology to convey human warmth because of the warm hearts of the people who used it. People could once again realize that the human touch is the greatest factor for technology to develop close to humans in a meaningful way.