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Will Machine Learning and Mixed Reality enable Virtual Time Travel?
The European Time Machine Project opens a new Perspective on History and Cultural Heritage
Traveling in time has always been a dream of mankind. Imagine being able to experience ancient Rome first hand or to move back to the days of our ancestors to experience how people were living at that time. Obviously, such time travel goes well beyond our physical limitations of today.
Still, despite the impossibility of real-time travel, a consortium of more than 225 European research institutions from 32 countries is planning to build a virtual Time Machine. This Time Machine is meant to be a large database that is able to store, interpret, and connect various kinds of historical information ranging from text and images over maps and 3D models to music and other sensory information. The role of the Time Machine is then to link all this information and to reconstruct plausible views into the past. Finally, it should allow us to navigate all these data in order to move in time and space as easily as we do on the Internet today.
