XR Time Capsules: Immersive Archives to Preserve Cultural Memory

As XR becomes increasingly prevalent, new and interesting ways of using it are being developed. While many are happy with the gaming, educational, and even work-related potential for immersive environments, others are exploring the potential for even more fundamental uses that will benefit us all. The desire to ensure that all of our knowledge is maintained has led to a surge in interest in XR time capsules. 

XR Time Capsules?

Traditional time capsules have been a feature of schools for decades. A time capsule is a box or other suitable container that holds a collection of items or information that people in the future will find. It keeps things and records so that people in the future can learn about the past. People typically bury or keep these capsules in a certain place for a certain amount of time, with the plan to open them later. 

Time capsules are made to talk to people in the future and to be insightful. They provide people with a peek into the past and show them how people lived, what technology and culture was like at the time. Traditional items set aside for a time capsule can be highly varied, but will usually include newspapers, photos, letters, clothes, technology examples, and other things that show what life was like decades before. Everything that will help a future generation understand and appreciate what life was like when the capsule was buried.

A few inventive individuals and companies are now taking that notion a step further and are developing what will be time capsules for the 21st century, based on XR technology. 

An XR time capsule is a concept that combines the idea of a classic physical time capsule with the technology of Extended Reality. The goal of this concept is to preserve and allow future experiences of previous events or information in a digitally immersive manner. XR makes it possible to create digital worlds that are both interactive and immersive, and these environments may be viewed and engaged with through the use of an XR headset. Imagine using XR to walk through lost cities, endangered languages, or even personal memories encoded as explorable environments.

So, an XR time capsule is comparable to a digital artefact or experience that is intended to transport viewers back to a particular point in time through the use of XR technologies, recreating the subject or event in perfect clarity. This provides users with the opportunity to investigate historical events or information in a manner that is more engaging than a physical time capsule possesses. In contrast to physical time capsules, which are designed to store artefacts for the purpose of future discovery, XR time capsules are expected to store digital material and experiences for the purpose of future intervention and access. But what is for something to be classed as a time capsule rather than just a digital library or museum?

Creating Boundaries

We need to look at Wikipedia – the massive online encyclopaedia – and understand what that is when we try to differentiate between the simple holding of information and how an XR time capsule is different from that. Without doubt, the Wikipedia model is a vast repository of information which both current and future generations can and will be able to access and use to understand what is finally hoped to be everything about everything; it is an encyclopaedia, but that is very different from a time capsule, as we shall see.

While sites like Wikipedia – which isn’t currently an XR App anyway – aim to provide us with interlinked information, a time capsule is intended to give us a narrow snap-shot of a particular time and place in history. It is much more close-focus and personal, and that becomes the defining boundary. Encyclopaedia’s try to cover everything while time capsules are very specific in their scope.

What’s In the Capsule?

Plainly, an XR time capsule is a completely different beast from a cylinder or box buried in the ground for twenty years, and the contents are plainly going to be XR-friendly, but that is not necessarily in any way restrictive.  

Part of the joy of a traditional time capsule is that, once opened, the users actually get to feel and explore the items from yesteryear, and a XR experience may not be able to duplicate that. But wait – we now live in a world where XR can connect seamlessly with haptic devices, giving realism to the virtual worlds that we create. This means that we can populate a virtual environment with items that the user can actually interact with, and with VR-device graphics getting ever better, the finished result will be of amazing quality.

So, the answer to what we can put in the virtual time capsule is anything that we can model in the appropriate software, which nowadays is typically Unity. It means that even the most up to date things that we have can be accurately modelled and used in a virtual time capsule. The precise nature of today’s haptic devices means that we can appreciate them as being akin to the real item in the XR environment.

Consider a virtual time capsule as more of a series of discrete rooms or areas that allow the owner to populate it with virtual items and information about the time via smart wallpapers and noticeboards.  

This makes a virtual time capsule more like a virtual mind palace than a simple box of collected items. A mind palace is a memory technique that includes linking things that need to be recalled with certain locations inside an imagined area, such as a structure that is already familiar to the individual. By mentally wandering around this “palace,” one is able to obtain the knowledge that is linked with it. Memory has been improved via the application of this time-honoured method for ages, and it has been included in popular media such as the Sherlock Holmes series because of its effectiveness. Extending this concept to a virtual time capsule, the user would enter a virtual area and be able to see and interact with the artifacts that have been stored there.  

This becomes the main difference between a metal can and an XR experience; one is a bucket of bits while the other is a deeply meaningful and immersive experience that fully captures the true flavour of the time it was set.  Constructing such a virtual area and the modelling of the artifacts is easy for professional developers. 

Of course, the point of a time capsule is that it remains unopened for a specific time – usually as much as twenty-five years – but this could be developed in the Unity software so that anyone trying to enter the App will be prevented from doing so until the requisite amount of time has passed. This way, the time capsule fulfils its function as being a safe repository for the information that is being held inside. Having a digital lock on the App also means that, once locked, no more information can be added and anything that is in there cannot be updated. It becomes representative of the time it was closed and by that token, a true time capsule. 

XR time capsules are going to become big business. If you fancy setting aside the current world for future generations, and need help with the project, why not contact us and see how we can help you with the technical parts.