the timboucher experience

Continuing on the thread from yesterday’s discussion of omnipresent surveillance systems and what to do about them. This one’s a little more conjectural, but interesting nonetheless.

Let’s say you’re collecting bits of data on just about every possible thing you can: people’s activities, the weather & climate, outer-space, whatever. So you have this massive set of data which, if you’re ridiculously wealthy and can afford the technology, you can use to simulate and predict complex behaviors. But that’s only one direction on the time axis. Theoretically, wouldn’t you also be able to use that same technology (perhaps with some modifications) retroactively - in essence, “predicting” the past?

If not that though, you’d still be able to step backwards through your simulation to past states of the simulated system. In many software packages (like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), you have ability to do the same thing with the history palette, reverting back to earlier stages of the evolution of whatever your project is. Twitter, too, has something called the Public Timeline in which all users (who don’t protect their posts) have all of their posts listed in chronological order.

Now let’s make one more quantum leap and throw in some other “cool” sci-fi technology: virtual reality/augmented reality. We’re talking immersive data environments which, theoretically, you’d be able to walk around in and experience perceptually.

Marrying these all together then, with Reality Mining and VR/AR tech, wouldn’t you be able to create fully-immersive time travel environments (if only in simulation) interpolated out of collected bits of data? The more bits of data you collect, the more accurate your simulation is likely to be. The way we as humans seem to experience time passing could be thought of as the changing of values of data points around us.

Anyway, I just thought this was a fun thought experiment. Been floating around in my head for a few weeks now… Or maybe it came from the future. Maybe they’re visiting us now!

• Friendster dumbass
• Underground Concept Mining
• Historical Re-Creation & Augmented Reality
• My own data mining… you’re getting warmer (or is it wormer?)
• To Doug on GNAT