Physicians and psychologists are talking about the meaning of “time” and even questioning its existence, it seems that the definition of time is getting blurred in metaverse era.
If our universe is 4-dimension(including time) space, metaverse will be at least a 5-dimention one, in which time is never in one direction, but like “length” or “width” in 3D space, past and future become left and right.
Think about it, with Unreal engine 5’s immersive photorealistic capability and blockchain faithfully recording the one truth of what has happened, in metaverse you can literaly travel in spacetime to certain scene of your life in the past, then back to the future.
Now you can mimic time travel by watching old youtube videos, or browse old photos on your Facebooc account. However you cannot turn you iPhone screen into a magic door and walk inside to the past, even you could do that after you have some weed and get high, the lack of information and your blurred memory will prevent you go too far.
We need to create digital twin for everything.
We need to create metahuman for everybody.
We need to track the movement and process of everything, by creating 3D mesh of the space and do spatial computing with depth cameras to track all the item, this will also preserve binaural sound, temperature and fragrance.
Most importantly, we need to record the key behavior of everybody and the interaction between any two people, better with a blockchain, well, so that no one can change the past.
If BMI(Brain Machine Interface) is still not ready yet, we might at least need a 4K grade VR headset connecting to cloud rendering service that supports Unreal engine 5(or above) with 6G network. They can improvise the touch/fragrance part to make the user feel more immersive.
As a fact, you are constantly ignoring important things that are happening “now”.
Never mind, you get a second chance, even third chance to know what you have missed yesterday, not just watching yourself to re-do the past, but flying around the whole world like the god, and press pause/reverse/replay button whenever you want and enjoy funny moments, or understand why some people decided to do what.
The experience is so immersive that you almost believe you can talk to the people in “yesterday”, or change the past to make something better for your “today”, however, no one will see you, and you cannot make any meaningful difference to change anything in the preserved “yesterday”.
Theoretically you can live in that “yesterday” for a year and feel no boring, since that one day will be a “short-lived universe” and a “living museum”, there should be enough story, enough detail, enough information for you to browse.
This “yesterday” is emotionless, sometimes even too cruel for some people. You are in it, but you can basically do nothing. Not everyone is Bran with the three-eyed raven, who can force “past” young hodor to hold the “now” door.
Some people may believe that this could revolutionize movie industry, or make movie obsolete, however I don’t think this will challenge current movie industry too much, because each movie is a metaverse with cherry-picked perspective, and perspective is important too. As a human being, limited perspective might feel more realistic.