The Ontology of Mixed Reality Agents Memorializing the Dead and Dying

摘要

Beginning with the 2009 publication of Michael Massimi's Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI, researchers have been exploring how to design UX and UI for end-of-life systems and memorials. This work has resulted in the design of interactive posthumous personhoods memorializing those who have lived by utilizing the data the deceased produced while they were alive. HCI designers and researchers have implemented Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create interactive posthumous personhoods in the form of chatbots. Over the last five years, Mixed Reality (MR) has been integrated by practitioners to create posthumous personhoods that they claim offer a greater fidelity with the departed when they were alive than previous technologies. How MR intersects with those previous technologies, cultural, personal heritage, and memorialization to achieve this greater fidelity requires further exploration if the media is to be used to elevate the evidentiary status of these posthumous personhoods. Insights from HCI end-of-life literature, death and dying studies, and interactive non-fiction are used to explore the ontology of these interactive posthumous personhoods to discover what MR is doing. This paper elucidates connected ethical, ontological, and thanatological issues that the HCI field needs to address as this alternative practice of mourning and memorialization becomes a mainstream practice. The paper argues that MR increases the social and spatial presence of an MR posthumous personhood's identity and subjectivity with greater fidelity than previous technologies, and that this supports an audience's active creation of belief in the agent as being evidentiary of a posthumous personhood.