OnHongKongIsle 在香港岛

Yesterday Dave sent me a link to Dan's site about "Virtual Shanghai":

"Virtual Shanghai is a research and resource platform on the history of Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century to nowadays. It incorporates four sets of documents: essays, original documents, photographies, and maps. The objective of the project is to write a history of the city through the combined mobilization of these various sets of documents. The implementation of this approach relies on the use of NTIC technologies and GIS technology. On the research side, the platform will offer various ways to step into the history of the city and follow its course at different levels over time. On the resource side, apart from providing original textual and visual documents, it develops a powerful cartographic tool for both observation and creation. The authors of the present project suscribe to the idea of sharing scholarship and research tools for the benefit of scholars, students, and citizens at large."

This project excites me as it reminds me so much of my own Backstreet VR idea based around the street that ran in back of the graduate school (with particular attention to the 2003-2004 period) where the foreign teachers lived, called Guanglin Yi Lu. This is a fantastic, local street with a real vibrance to it that I never found an equal to in any of the other 17 mainland Chinese cities I've visited.

When I woke up on Aug 22nd, 2003, the sight through the back gate - still locked tight for SARS - of the bikes, prostitutes, hair salons, butchers and plant sellers, DVD hawkers, mobile phone and calling card shops, baking dan bings, stacked produce and crawling hairy crabs, "Hello Kitty" shops, shoe repair booths, dry cleaners, fortune tellers, children in red scarves and jiaozi wickers stacked ten high were my first glimpses of China.

Over two years, I started taking hundreds of pictures of this street. Strange pictures, from strange angles (and snippets of sound and video), even going out during different weather and lighting conditions to capture close-up "textures" of bricks, pavement, tree bark and lampposts. The types of pictures that might allow a computer to stitch all these photos together - ten or fifteen years from now - to create a fully-immersive VR environment, allowing me to visit and walk down my beloved street once again.

But the potential for this project is so huge, especially if it could serve as a platform for data-sharing with upcoming GeoTagging cameras and new object-recognition algorithms. Just imagine! It's long been a fantasy of mine to go explore Hong Kong and Shanghai decade by decade across the last two hundred years, walking and touching the actual place and time, and seeing the changes from year to year. :)

In fact, at night I often dream about slipping backwards in time, growing younger in relation to how far back I've passed. Perhaps many have such dreams, I don't know. On Monday morning - before the waking hour - I came across an Irish girl in the New York of 1901 and tried to impress her with information about the future.

But she answered, "Yes, yes, I met a boy from 2050 earlier this summer who talked just as you do about two great wars, traveling to the moon and an adding machine that can be held in just one hand. But what I want to know is: are you a good kisser?"