Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

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Linkage1992
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Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

Sorry if this is a bit off topic and not technical, I’m new to these forums.

I understand that the following will only be possible a few decades down the line, when photorealistic, immersive VR has been achieved as well as true AI, but it’s still fun to think about!

Just imagine if you could sit down and tell your AI assistant to create an accurate simulation of any time period in any location. It would scour the internet for every bit of information about that time period (I’m talking videos, photos, wikis etc) confirming the validity of each and every bit of information in the process. At the end, it would create an accurate portrayal of the time for you to step into and explore, or just observe if you wish. The best part would be that it could also populate the simulation with intelligent people who know nothing about the future and whose knowledge would be limited to what they could realistically, at that time, have known. Again all this information would be gathered by the AI.

Such a simulation, while being less accurate than true time travel, would be a lot of fun if you wanted to mess around! You could tell the AI to, for example, make you a blue alien in a spaceship and have it crash into the middle of 19th century London to see the reactions of the people. Or you could ask it to give you an iPhone or any other object imaginable to amaze a simulated Leonardo da Vinci. The possibilities would be truly endless, not to mention the fact that you wouldn’t have to worry about paradoxes. What do you think? :)
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Namielus »

Sounds cool, I really hope something simpler comes along soon - letting you experience various historical events in todays VR-standards.
btw, why did you create two identical topics?
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

Well I posted it in the other off topic section, but that one's kinda dead. Can you delete posts?
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Namielus »

Sorry but no
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

Damn :?
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by cybereality »

I deleted the other topic. In the future, please don't double post.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I think this is an interesting idea. But it would require a huge amount of effort (ie artists, historians, etc.) to recreate the world at all these different time periods. Maybe it could be done if it were restricted to one single city or town and a few key time periods. This is much like the 'virtual tourism' people have been taking about but instead you would be touring the past (or future even). Could be cool.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Mystify »

One game I've been working on(at a purely theoretical level) is a time travel simulator. Only, instead of trying to recreate actual history, it would simulate the entire history of a world. In general, this would operate at a gross level-picture the high-level scope that a game of civilization has. You have countries, they develop, utilize resources, engage in wars, etc. This gives you the overall progression of the timeline. If you look at any given part of the timeline, the level of detail would effectively zoom in for that time. You look at a war, and it would, given the start and end states of the war, fill in the details of how it unfolded. Map out major battles, troop movements, supply lines, etc. You zoom in on a battle, and it would then, again working to match the start and end results, map out squadrons, individual kills, etc. You then zoom in on the specific instance of a battle, and it would resolve it as if it were a fps.
Wars would not be the only places where it can zoom in, but it illustrates the concept.
Given such a structure, you could identify key points in the timeline, visit them, and even alter them. Your changes to the zoomed in part would be reflected in the outcome of the next higher level, which redoes the simulation from that point, sees what the outcome is of that, and effectively ripples your change outwards. There could also be a "butterfly effect" variable that modifies random outcomes by an amount proportional to how far into the future from the change you go.
Once you have the structure of the timeline, you would use it to generate procedural content to represent that timeline. Determine what resources are available in a city to determine potential building materials, influence it with how warlike it is, leave scars in the city if it was under attack before, etc.
This is all possible, but far beyond the level of effort I can do as a single developer. Commercially, it would probably need to be built up component by component- make a civilization type game for the overall timeline, make a battle simulator, make a battleground fps, develop procedural content generation for use in other games, etc., all the while keeping this goal in mind when designing them. Then these components could be assembled into the final, complete simulator.
Imagine being able to identify a ruthless ruler, and go back in time to assassinate them, then seeing how history changes. Or conversely, going back in time to prevent the assassination of a visionary. Imagine being able to find a future of high-tech weapons and equipment to prepare yourself, then drop back in time to face the barbarian hordes. Utilize classic time travel tricks like extremely long-term investments or cheating at gambling to earn resources-though be careful you don't utilize the wrong currency from a dead timeline. Imagine being able to drop yourself in the middle of an ancient golden age. Bring back advanced technology to advance an ancient culture ahead of it's time.
The implicit goal of the game would be to engineer a better future, but you would have the whole of time as your playground.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by PalmerTech »

I think that smart enough AI is a long ways down the road. I have been to a few medieval reenactments where everyone is required to be in costume and act in character, and the sense of being in the past is incredible. I think an MMO set in the past with strict "stay in character rules" for at least some servers could come pretty close to time travel.

The difficulty there would be having people know how they should act, we can't expect everyone to know exactly what to do without extensive research/experience in the world; Maybe a large staff of trained people controlling NPCs? It would not be that expensive if you paid people in a third world country to do it, especially if it essentially offered a full-time escape from the realities of living in places like rural China or what is left of Nigeria.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Namielus »

PalmerTech, do you think large scale motion capture/animation software will be available (even for rent) any time in the near future?
It would be insanely cool to have some of these reenactments and capture it for VR, and use it to make kids more interested in history.

It might not be entirely interactive, since its all prerecorded, but maybe one can make a hybrid where some characters are dynamic?
I remember seeing a motion capture rig that could capture both motion/animation, texture and mesh in one operation from multiple people at a time.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by android78 »

@Linkage1992 - I think that there's an organization by the name of Abstergo that is working on the technology you're talking about, but using DNA rather then the internet! They use a virtual reality machine called an animus, which jacks directly into your brain though, I think.
There's also a starship which has an AI that seems to be capable of this and recreates it in a holographic room.
More seriously though, this is a cool idea, but I think the AI that is able to discern and discriminate between fact and fiction on the internet is still a long way down the track. I would guess that we'll have self-aware machines at about the same time as we have this. In the meantime, I think that we will get games like assassins creed using VR so that we can experience reasonable reproductions of different time periods with a lot of human art. There seems to be a lot of work being done on automatic generation of environments (mainly natural elements within the environments so far, but there seems no reason it couldn't include man-made aspects) with little human input, so it's not really far fetched to think that you could have the basic ages with pre-defined parameters that would generate environments to reflect what it would have been like, but it would be a representation of the world, not how the real world was.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Oneironaut »

It would not be that expensive if you paid people in a third world country to do it, especially if it essentially offered a full-time escape from the realities of living in places like rural China or what is left of Nigeria.
I like the cut of your jib, Palmer Luckey.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Moriarty »

VR history trips would be one of my favorite things of all the exciting possibilities Virtual Reality will offer in the future. I don't think it will include ultra-intelligent AI any time soon though, or the possibility to change the world in real time.

But realistic environments/architecture and maybe even historical events should be possible (a lot of games already use a great looking but somewhat watered downed version of history as a background) I was pleased to see that Oculus picked a mock medieval village for one of the CES demos, maybe it will give some people ideas. :mrgreen: Like I said in one of the Virtual Tourism threads, I hope that there are a few university/research groups or edutainment companies who want to experiment with the Rift. There are a lot of great historical reconstruction projects that could use a touch of VR. :geek:
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by DeeKej »

DrZimmerman wrote:Like I said in one of the Virtual Tourism threads, I hope that there are a few university/research groups or edutainment companies who want to experiment with the Rift.
Oh there are. :mrgreen:

I'm slowly gathering a group of people at my university (all of them students in computer gamedesign) that're interested in VR in order to first of all create some kind of VR software, but to then expand and make greater and greater projects. I'm in the process of trying to get a hold of the chief of the department to show him a few videos of the Rift, so we can purchase one or more in order to really get going. ^^
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

Hmm, a lot of interesting proposals for ways this can be accomplished while the technology is still in its infancy! Mystify, that sounds pretty cool! Can't wait to see if what you've come up with eventually comes to fruition.

android78, haha, I am a big fan of the Assassins Creed series but didn't think of it at all while writing this post. Maybe it subliminally rubbed off on me.

PalmerTech, that is actually a brilliant way of breaking into an untapped market, kind of like what you've done with VR (congrats on the progress by the way)

I started playing around with Unity the other day as the Rift got me interested in developing games. When I get good enough I'm definately going to try my hand at recreating a small portion of 1901 New York City. Historical simulations like this will definitely be a focus of mine as a way of getting to the future I've described sooner.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Zaptruder »

OP's idea is in my estimation... in the region of 35-50 years out. What's been described is an extension of Google's current tech... but with a dash of complete-AI that can understand massively parallel contextual searches... like our human brain. Except with planetary scale processing power to categorize and catalogue information.

Something that's closer that's similar to an extent is Mirror World rewind.

An extension of Google Map technologies - it'll use user captured camera feeds from their Google Glasses to stitch together a mirror world using DTAM (dense tracking and mapping) technologies... and using image recognition AI recognize what is and isn't a fixed element in the scene - record changes and update the mirror world, while storing the old version.

The end result will be the ability to navigate the mirror world through a time line of when all these camera feeds start getting uploaded to the Gmapping cloud. So in more populated area, you get more accurate temporal data, in less populated areas, you might get sparse temporal data.

Another benefit to this system the the ability to co-locate your telepresence self in the real world. e.g. Jim is standing in NY, times square with a AR/VR headset. Tom is at home in Melbourne Australia. Tom accesses the gmap mirror world in real time, and is able to talk to Jim as though he were standing in the space with him. Jim sees Tom's projection overlaid in the real environment.

That tech in my estimation is around 10-15 years out.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Mystify »

I agree, the AI needed for this is a long way out. I studied AI specifically in college and now work on AI systems. We aren't anywhere near being able to pull something like this off.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by android78 »

Linkage1992 wrote:...
Historical simulations like this will definitely be a focus of mine as a way of getting to the future I've described sooner.
So you want to get to the future sooner so you can travel to the past? Then you can go 'Back to the future'! All I can suggest is to make sure you don't hook up with your mum, since this causes all sorts of issues. I love those movies... *falls into dream of traveling through time at 88mph in a delorean*
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by vtms »

Well, it's safe to say this is a post-Singularity technology that only a superintelligence can create. Probably not sooner than 5 years from now, not later than 20.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by rmcclelland »

PalmerTech wrote:The difficulty there would be having people know how they should act, we can't expect everyone to know exactly what to do without extensive research/experience in the world; Maybe a large staff of trained people controlling NPCs? It would not be that expensive if you paid people in a third world country to do it, especially if it essentially offered a full-time escape from the realities of living in places like rural China or what is left of Nigeria.
I believe this was explored a bit in Neal Stephenson's book, "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". Recommended read.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Oneironaut »

Another approach to AI is to "simply" copy the human brain. That doesn't mean individually mapping out every neuron and synapse, but having very detailed models at each level of organization and then simulating it. To that end, the Human Brain Project led by Prof. Henry Markram just won a 1.3 billion euro grant from the European Union, the biggest in history. The main goal of the project is to create more effective remedies for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Will this project create human-level AI by 2023? Probably not. But its discoveries on the massively parallel, hierarchical methods used by the brain will add to the ever growing AI toolbox. It's worth keeping on eye on, in any case.

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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

Oneironaut, I watched the entire proposal a few days ago after they announced the funding. Exciting stuff, can't wait to see where it leads.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by WiredEarp »

@ Oneironaut, I think that is probably the only way we will get 'real' AI, rather than very complete simulations of AI.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Linkage1992 »

@WiredEarp, the more we understand about the real brain, the better we'll be able to make these simulations. This research will filter into every field. And who knows? Perhaps someday we might actually be able to put a true AI into the game, rather than a simulation.
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Kerry »

Namielus wrote:Sounds cool, I really hope something simpler comes along soon - letting you experience various historical events in todays VR-standards.
btw, why did you create two identical topics?
This, is actually a huge dream of mine. I'd love to be able to experience a simulation of a huge event in history.
Imagine going back to Prehistoric times, and observing dinosaurs! :o
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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by Oneironaut »

Once Markram's team nail down the anatomical details, they can then create functionally equivalent simulations that require less computing power, and incorporate those algorithms in ASICs called "Neuromorphic Chips". If you're interested, a filmmaker called Noah Hutton is making a ten-year (or however long the project may last) documentary on the subject. We're up to year three now.

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Re: Time travel using VR and ultra intelligent AI

Post by serrarens »

Remarkable I didn't see this thread earlier. Because this is what my project is about. I am reconstructing the history of a small town. This weekend I actually posted a video in which you can see that the basics are working for travelling though time.

About the AI: I have a lot of ideas about this, but hardly any time to try them out. Thing is that the basic reactions of people are now very complex. When something exceptional happens, like a blue alien landing, people respond in general in a predefined way (yes, I have read the work of Isaac Asimov). This can be captured in the AI. The hardest part (if possible at all) is interacting with those people directly, because then they use all of their experiences, knowledge and specific behaviors.

Pascal.
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