Since a long time, – people have been fascinated with the idea of time traveling. For my generation it was the H.G.Wells classic “Time machine ” and the movie “Back to the Future” which kept us hooked on to the concept of time traveling. Though it sounds very appealing there were very few concrete theories which would make time traveling a reality..

A couple of days ago I was thinking about time traveling and wondering if there is any current research going on in this field. I hardly found anything worth mentioning. I found myself asking, how close can we get to experiencing time traveling with the recent advancement in technology?

So what does time traveling fundamentally mean? Till the time, traveling faster than speed of light becomes a reality with all the information on cosmic strings, black holes and wormholes involved, let’s just say that time traveling is a concept of being able to move between different moments of time. Being able to send an object or self backward in time before the present or forward from the present to the future. Will we be able to make or change history by time traveling is debatable and the dilemma is well captured by the classical theory of “grandfather’s paradox”.

So how do we experience time traveling? How can we experience a place or event from the past?

One way of getting close to a time traveling experience would be creating a virtual reality environment where the user selects an era and enters a virtual reality environment. With technology advancement it is now possible to develop a six sided virtual realty room designed to immerse the user in a high-end multimedia experience. So fundamentally a user can select a bygone Egyptian period and walk into a pharaoh’s court.

What would help to make this a much realistic experience? Being able to experience a place or event, which you have seen or experienced a few years ago . Imagine a street which you have walked down in your schools days or a friend’s birthday party 16 years -ago.

To get this to reality we will have to look at some of the latest technologies which are being used extensively or are in the trial phase.

• Today old photographs can be easily converted into high quality digital prints
• With the advent of Web 2.0 it’s easy to share these photographs and videos tagged with name of place, event, published date etc.
• Technology like Google Earth, Street View, has brought us closer to a real life experience
• Concepts like Photosynth (Microsoft) can help you build complete 3D views of streets, building etc. using digital information extracted from normal digital photographs shared on photo sharing sites like Flickr.
• Facial features from digital photographs can be used to create 3D models and avatars
• Virtual World applications like Second Life allow avatars to interact in a virtual environment

If you imagine these technologies put together with the virtual reality room you’ll have a virtual environment which would allow a user to walk back into a street or place as it was a few years ago. With an environment generated like Second Life this can become a highly interactive experience for the users. Over a period as technology improves this experience will become much richer and hopefully also be able to create a virtual world way ahead of the present time to enable a walk into the future or past as the viewer desires.