The Tech Lab: Alastair ReynoldsReynolds had a brief slot on a BBC program in February discussing some of these ideas. I remember seeing it, which is odd because I didn't watch the whole program. Either I happened to switch on the television (itself unusual) at exactly the right time or, perhaps more likely, the BBC used the clip in an advert.
(BBC)
Science fiction author Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Century Rain, wonders if we could do a better job of looking back into history.
If there's a silver lining to the dark cloud of CGI-dominated blockbusters that seem to infest the cinema lately, it's this: the same digital technology that can make Spiderman or Hulk leap around the screen in a singularly unconvincing fashion, can also be used to create something infinitely more interesting: the past.
Imagine if you could actually walk around in a simulated version of a scene from history? Wouldn't that be worth an hour of anyone's time?
I'm not talking about the Star Trek holodeck here. I'm talking about something we could have sometime next week, if the appropriate technologies were combined.
[...]
Imagine visiting an historical site a few years down the line, something like the Roman spa in the city of Bath. Instead of being given the option to hire a handset with a pre-recorded commentary, you get given a pair of goggles, with an associated earpiece.
They're a bit scuffed from repeated use, but they've been thoroughly cleaned since the last person used them. You put them on and move into the museum proper. The goggles are preset for 45AD, but you can move the left-hand slider up and down to surf through the ages. If you wish you can even skip to post Roman times and stroll around the greening ruins.
Importantly, there's a second slider on the right side of the goggles. This one is preset to low immersion: when you first don the goggles, it displays the simulated overlay as a ghostly tracery, a bit like the vector graphics of old arcade games. You can see where walls and floors used to be, but you're still firmly anchored to the real world.
Turn the slider up a bit, though, and the overlays become progressively more solid, more photo-real.
Turn it up a bit more and the glasses begin selectively deleting what they don't want you to see - the modern walls that are in the wrong place, the modern ceiling that should show the blue sky and clouds of Roman Britain instead. What's more, the slider goes even further up the scale.
[...]
Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite SF authors and I'm currently reading his The Prefect.
UPDATE: A tangetially related item here: Ancient Tourism.