4dVR

The human fascination with dollhouses and simulations has found one recent temporary home in SecondLife and its compatible open sims.

Enthusiasts can rebuild real neighborhoods with as much visual detail as they care to model.

So isn't it inevitable that a universal grid will be attempted that positions these neighborhoods in their real relative locations, filling in the intervening landscapes algorithmically?

And won't those fill-algorithms grow increasingly sophisticated, importing appropriate databases to show mocked-up geography, roads, cities?

And the enthusiasts will be able to tweak the algorithmic mockups, so that the houses on their algorithmically mocked-up streets actually look like the real houses...

But nostalgists may want to rebuild a neighborhood as they remember it from their youth, so the universal grid will need to be 4-D...

And the farther back they want to go in time, the more fragmentary will be the surviving databases that can be imported.

But this challenge must inevitably mature, from enthusiasts-tweaking-dollhouses to historians modelling the past.

For example, Google Books has a moderately good grasp of what books could have been seen in libraries at any point in the last 500 years. Wikipedia knows approximately which products and technologies were or weren't available at any point. Databases of music and images are mostly unindexed by creation-date.

Genealogy databases can list the names and personal data of some growing percentage of the residents at any given time and place.

We have imperfect dictionaries of the languages and dialects spoken in other places and times. Google's ngrams let us trace turns of phrase as well.

Individuals' written memoirs can provide enormously detailed glimpses of particular times and places, that can be cautiously generalised to their wider neighborhoods.


addendum: 4dVRpedia

eventually inevitably most wikipedia articles will be layered on 4dvr, like 4D googlemap spacetimelines tracing entities' evolution, letting you zoom in on algorithmically generated animations of the critical events in their history.