Historica I: OpenSim

One of the projects I've been wanting to start on is a reconstruction of the world as it appeared at different points in time, a sort of historic view of what places like Chang'an, Athens, Rome, or even New York City looked like in the past.

The basic idea is that the information is all there, but it's invisible. We have it piecemeal - there is the outstandingly visual model of ancient Rome in the Museum of Roman Antiquity, there are models of ancient and modern cities, there are maps, there are views. But there is no consistent model.

Now, imagine you actually created a place like Wikipedia, where everybody interested can create a model of a city, of a building, and add the time coordinates when it existed. Then you'd be able to walk through an ancient city, or through New York in 1928, or watch San Francisco the way it looked like in 1989.

I had been working for months on this, trying to get different pieces of software to play together. The last thing I worked on was delta3d, a collection of open source projects that are made to play nice with each other. It has an interesting Python interface with which it's a real pleasure to play.

The real jump in interest, though, came when I found OpenSim. I am not sure how the project started, fact is it tries to be as compatible to SecondLife as can be. You can download the whole thing, compile it, and make it work. It's quite useless right now, since there aren't a lot of compelling applications, but it could do exactly what Historica needs.

Here is a link to the software:
http://opensimulator.org/