Sim Thoughts Come Full Circle.

[swestrup]

I started out, months ago, thinking of writing a simulator that museums could use to allow vistiors to experience VR walkthroughs of reconstructions of ancient habitations and interact with the people living there. Then I got onto thinking of other archeo and paleo uses for this thing (with an interactive 'level' editor that was designed to work with real data, field researchers could try to reconstruct areas while they are still being excavated, and with support for non-human creatures, one could try to model dinosaur ecologies as well as mating and hunting behaviours). From there I progressed to the idea of a general purpose person-and-object simulation engine that could do a thousand things, and could be used as an open-source replacement for the Sims.

Just today I was watching a show on early firefighting equipment preserved in an american museum, and I found myself thinking "I wonder if you could get a museum to digitize artifacts and upload them as object templates for my simulator. That way historical reenactment folks would have materials to work with, and the museums could get free advertising."