A Video-Enhanced Grave Marker (VEGM) is a Western-style tombstone equipped with weatherproofed video playback that would be initiated by remote control. Through sound and video, VEGMs would, in theory, make visits to graveyards an interactive experience.
This idea is very similar to the 1981 science fiction short story Walpurgisnacht by Roger Zelazny, and the foreword in the 1983 collection Unicorn Variations mentions an unexpected contemporary invention of a 'talking tombstone'. The 2004 film The Final Cut also features a similar idea, video-enhanced tombstones which play recordings extracted from memory chips implanted in the brain of the departed. Rudy Rucker has discussed a similar idea which he calls "lifeboxes," - devices that record information about people's lives and can carry on conversations after they die. James Joyce's 1904 novel Ulysses features Mr. Bloom contemplating an audio-only version of such a gravemarker:
"Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after fifteen years, say."
The VEGM, invented by Robert Barrows of San Mateo, California, would allow its owner to record messages to be played to loved ones or to any visitor to the site with a remote control. The stones would be equipped with weatherproofed video playback and recording devices plus memory systems and a television monitor placed within a weather-proofed, hollowed-out headstone. As of May 2005, Barrows estimated that the costs of the VEGMs might start at about USD$8000 to $10,000.
U.S. Patent 7,089,495 was issued on The Video Enhanced Gravemarker on August 8, 2006. Barrows commented soon after its invention: "I envision being able to walk through a cemetery using a remote control, clicking on graves and what all the people buried there have to say. They can say all the things they didn't have the opportunity or guts to say when they were alive."
To overcome noise pollution objections, the audio can also be transmitted to wireless headsets, made available by the cemetery's office. Commenting on the threat from thieves or vandals Barrows adds "There are very strict laws against vandalizing tombstones, and if you are going to vandalize a tombstone, you'd better hope there are no such things as ghosts."
The issue of censorship would likely be of concern with VEGMs. How high a level of free speech would be offered to the eventually deceased or epitaph producer is undecided.
Famous quotes containing the words grave and/or marker:
““To-morrow,” Mrs. Viveash interrupted him, “will be as awful as to-day.” She breathed it like a truth from beyond the grave prematurely revealed, expiringly from her death-bed within.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)