When the University of Minnesota offered to let me experience what it’s like to die, naturally I said yes.
Aren’t we all morbidly curious about the undiscovered country, as Hamlet put it, from which no traveller returns?
Except this time, happily, I would get to return because it would be a virtual death, an experience in a VR studio that’s part of the American university’s Health Sciences Library system.
The dying experience is part of a series of VR simulations developed by a nine-year-old California-based company called Embodied Labs.
It has created immersive, first-person experiences of what it’s like to have dementia, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease; to have lost vision or hearing; to be socially isolated; and to experience ageing as an LGBTQ person.
And what it’s like to die.