BrainStream: Digital Historical Preservation

I think a lot about historical preservation. I have a fascination with history and retaining digital archives. So when I came across Virtual Toad: A CGI Reconstruction of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, all sorts of thoughts came to mind.

A year or so ago, I came across an MIT project to create a game based on Colonial Williamsburg's involvement in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. I met with the group and exchanged some emails, but real life got the best of me. However I did have a nice bit of a side-project to see if I could recreate what the city looked like during the time of the game. I was looking at property plots and names of who owned what house and blueprints. Way to huge a project but it was fun for a while.

So, with people beginning to recreate 3D versions of places and things in games, what sort of information would we need to store? How would we best recreate things when we hit the Star Trek Holodeck phase? Building measurements? Exact description of materials? Samples? Molecular composition?

How much information is it possible to store? In theory, before demolishing something or replacing a building or attraction, why not collect as much forensic detail about the place and store it in some archive like DSpace, meant to be around for at least a century.

Something to think about and maybe begin development of.

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