Nick and Steve have both lost their fathers. The friends' common grief has brought them to undertake an ambitious project. The programmers are trying to bring their lost fathers back from the dead in the form of a virtual reality app called Project Elysium.
Nick Stavrou and Steve Koutsouliotas are the co-founders of Paranormal Games, a small game developer in Adelaide, Australia. They have entered Project Elysium in the Oculus VR Jam 2015, an annual contest held to find the best creation for the Facebook-owned virtual reality glasses.
As the pair outline in the video below, Steve approached his best friend Nick with the idea to try to help him deal with the loss of his father. "The VR challenge came along and we thought, we can do this now with this sort of technology," said Stavrou.
Stavrou has volunteered to be the first client of Project Elysium. Koutsouliotas is charged with creating virtual models of both his friend and his deceased father. Stavrou says he wants to understand how seeing virtual versions of a deceased relative will affect people. "Starting to think about seeing him again weighs heavy on you," he admits.
The pair have been in contact with professional grief counsellors and are working closely with them to find the most appropriate way to handle the project. "This experience is not a game. Not at all. It's a very serious heartfelt project with a lot of meaning to us and is being made respectfully."
The project first came to light last week when screenshots of a virtualized Nick Stavrou appeared on the Project Elysium Twitter account. It's not clear how advanced the project is, but the new information has been released in line with Oculus VR Jam 2015 contest guidelines. To be eligible for the jam's grand prize, the team has to showcase more screenshots by April 27, followed by video footage the week after. The grand prize winner in this track will receive $100,000, with runner-ups earning $50,000, $30,000 and $10,000, respectively. Final submissions are due by May 11 so we can assume that development is nearly complete.
It's a very interesting use-case for this burgeoning technology, but one that raises more than a few moral quandaries. Firstly, should we be doing this kind of thing at all? Assuming there is some value to the project, how should it work? Should the deceased have to give permission for his likeness to be used before he passes? Or is this a private undertaking for the griever and for them to create their relative as they remember them?
They're all interesting questions that no doubt the two developers have discussed with grief counselors, but at the end of the day if it can help people deal with bereavement and get through a difficult time in their lives, then why not use the technology available to us?
Photo: Sergey Galyonkin | Flickr
