Augmented – Candi K Cann

A similar but much lower-tech version of this experience is prevalent in Korea and Thailand, where death cafés are popular. The United States and the United Kingdom have had death cafés for a while, where people meet and eat cake and drink coffee while sharing their thoughts about death, dying, and grief, but in Asia the death café is an interactive experience in which one contemplates the realities of dying and death through reenactment with others.20 South Korean and Thai death cafés include wearing traditional funerary garb and being shut into a coffin to contemplate one’s death.

At the Kid Mai Café in Bangkok, the drinks have funny names, such as “Lastday,” “One Week Left,” “Painful,” and “One Month Left,” and come hot or iced. A skeleton lies on a couch, and customers are given the opportunity to take their turns in a coffin and think about their impending death.21 The XR experience of dying can be seen as a virtual version of these interactive, low-tech experiences.

Lying in the coffin in the café in Bangkok and participating in the interactive XR art installation in Melbourne are meant to spur people into thinking about their own death and talking about dying—as well as, it is hoped, planning their own funerals and outlining their wishes regarding the dying process. Other innovative therapeutic applications of XR include physical therapy with a VR headset or cognitive behavioral therapies offered via AR, VR, or the metaverse. XR Health claims to offer a “virtual treatment room in the metaverse for fun, game-like therapy.”22 The metaverse, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 6, is essentially a virtual world that connects various XR platforms into an alternate digital world and operates as a virtual landscape with its own set of coordinates located in a digital landscape.

Thus far, nearly all current iterations of the metaverse haven’t enjoyed much success. This may change as XR gets more sophisticated and sees wider acceptance among the general public, but for now the metaverse remains a little too elementary for those who want to use it more widely and yet is still too sophisticated for the average user.

© 2026 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. The MIT Press would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers who provided comments on drafts of this book. The generous work of academic experts is essential for establishing the authority and quality of our publications.

We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of these otherwise uncredited readers. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-05111-8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe, Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia | Email: [email protected] d_r0 1kitap1.com/en —to Siri —and Alexa —but most of all to Maia 1kitap1.com/en “We should begin to build an accurate map of the uncanny valley, so that through robotics research we can come to understand what makes us human.

This map is also necessary to enable us to create—using nonhuman designs—devices to which people can relate comfortably.” —Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley” “I want to do something with my life; I want to be a cyborg.” —Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg 1kitap1.com/en I gratefully acknowledge financial support for this book by the Fulbright US Scholar Program, which is sponsored by the US Department of State and the Fulbright Commission in Korea.

Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Fulbright Program, the Government of the United States, or the Fulbright Commission in Korea. 1kitap1.com/en Contents I Augmented Life 1 We Are Cyborgs 2 Assistive Technologies 3 Enhancements: What It Means to Be Human and Machine II Augmented Death 4 Medically Defined Death 5 Playing Dead 6 The Metaverse and Other Afterlives Conclusion: Afterlives or Afterdeaths? Acknowledgments Appendix Living Will Template Hospital Accommodation Plan for Disability Digital Remains Will Template Notes Bibliography Index 1kitap1.com/en I Augmented Life 1kitap1.com/en 1 We Are Cyborgs I have taught more than fifty world religion courses, and one of the most interesting aspects of teaching religion is how important the body is.

In Christianity, many people tend to underemphasize the body in favor of the soul, but I always tell my students that Jesus did not leave his body behind when he rose from the dead. He walked around showing everyone his wounds, even putting Thomas’s hand into his pierced side to prove to Thomas that he had been resurrected from the dead.

Jesus did not leave his flesh behind to rot in the tomb—he took it with him. Buddha also relied on his body to reach enlightenment.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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