Are you sitting comfortably?

Written for Funeralcare magazine, June 2018

My two grown-up bundles-of-excitement burst through the door to wish me a Happy Mothers’ Day. One holding a gorgeous bunch of flowers, and the other hiding something behind his back. “Come and sit down where you’re comfortable Mum, and close your eyes…”

Hoping like hell they’d outgrown the tricks of their respective boyish youths, I made myself comfortable on a bar stool at the kitchen counter, took a warming look out of the window at the sea under a greying sky, and closed my eyes as directed.

When I opened them again, I was sitting on a rocky outcrop halfway up Mt Kilimanjaro. I looked up at a dazzling blue sky, and listened to the wind whistling around me. The sun was shining, and I could feel its warmth on my face. I looked behind me and my stomach dropped about three storeys as I fumbled for a handhold. My boys were nowhere in sight. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I was sitting on a red couch in front of an enormous movie screen. A pair of shoes I didn’t recognise were on the floor to the right, and a newspaper was open on the couch next to me. The opening credits for a Netflix movie started to roll.

You might be wondering what my darlings put in my morning coffee.

The amazing experience of being transported somewhere else was courtesy of the latest 3D headset. This one, an incredibly affordable, lightweight and portable piece of magic is called Oculus GO, and it connects to a smartphone. (Geek heaven! Inspectress Gadget and her mini-me’s!)

Want to fly a plane? Go for it. Want to see the Northern Lights? Knock yourself out. Want to be at Nana’s funeral in Taupo this afternoon when you’re stuck in Edinburgh? We can make it happen. Not a couple of years down the track. Not as soon as the technology becomes affordable. Right now.

Many (most?) of us offer livestreaming of funeral services through mono-directional cameras installed in our chapels. Omni-directional cameras, capable of capturing 360-degree or immersive video, are now so affordable that they’re built in to the latest smartphones. Social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube give us instant access to these panoramic scenes, and encourage us “Go Live” and share our own. And oh-so-easily – one click, no cost, and you’re sharing your own livestream. But wait, there’s more! Facebook Live and YouTube Live both connect directly to currently available 3D headsets. The future really is now.

But… don’t ditch your streaming provider yet. There is one hurdle to overcome, and it’s not a technological limitation. It’s a not-insignificant wee beastie called copyright.

We can inadvertently trip over copyright law when we take an essentially private funeral service which plays a favourite song from a family-owned CD, and broadcast it via the internet. The private service just moved into the public arena.

The key element is one of constraint – where there is nothing to control who receives or watches the broadcast or stream. Understandable. But even with constraint – a private link to the stream, or login and password protection, publicly accessible sites can fall foul of the law. While many of our websites might fly under the radar due to their size, social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are subject to automated scanning to identify music subject to copyright.

There is a process that you can go through on these platforms to have your streams “white-listed”, so they are not identified as breaching copyright. But it is flawed, and heavily weighted to the country-of-origin of the platform. I find it deeply ironic that I can play a song from YouTube during a funeral service, yet have the whole service which contains that song muted when uploaded to the same platform. Especially when the video has been shared via a private link, and cannot be stumbled upon publicly. You can follow another process to dispute a copyright strike, and you can still find yourself sitting in the naughty corner looking at a stonily silent movie.

In short, it’s not yet a perfect world, but it is oh-so-very-close. And you can be sure I’ll be listening intently, and watching omni-directionally for the sea-change.