A tearful reunion between a mother and her dead daughter via advanced virtual reality for a South Korean television has become an online hit, triggering fierce debate about voyeurism and exploitation.

The footage began with the girl — who died of leukemia in 2016 — emerging from behind a pile of wood in a park, as if playing hide-and-seek.

“Mum, where have you been?” she asks. “I’ve missed you a lot. Have you missed me?”

Tears streaming down her face, Jang Ji-sung reached out towards her, wracked with emotion.

“I have missed you Na-yeon,” she told the computer-generated six-year-old, her hands moving to stroke her hair.

But in the real world, Jang was standing in front of a studio green screen, wearing a virtual reality headset and touch-sensitive gloves, her daughter’s ashes in a locket around her neck.

At times the camera cut to Jang’s watching husband and their three surviving children, wiping away tears of their own.