Think of MS Flight Simulator or Google Street View as documenting the current world. Then take the same approach to thoroughly document the past. The locations, the events, all in 3D VR with realistic graphics, and simulated actors that react to events and react to the players.
Take the current knowledge and physical/archaeological remains of the past, and digitise them, digitally renovate them. Do this rigorously and professionally. Not Hollywood-style approximation, but the work of real historians and archaeologists. Let historians use it and debate the details how it should really look, or how the events really unfolded and adjust it accordingly. Organise the database of content and simulations. AI is possibly already there to automate processing and conversion to 3D of old videos, photos and paintings, even perhaps writings to animation scripts. If not yet, some AI researcher is surely working on that.
Make a VR meta world, where players can travel to certain locations and certain time and interactively take part in the events.
I would pay a monthly subscription for such a thing, to see the past getting recreated digitally. It would be the next best thing we actually could do, compared to real time travel.
The closest thing to this I know of is The Forgotten City. It has some fantasy elements and the city itself isn't a real one.
Premise:
"The Forgotten City is a narrative-driven time loop adventure in ancient Rome. Discover the ruins of an ancient underground city, travel 2000 years into the past, and unravel the mystery of who destroyed it by cleverly exploiting the power to wind back time. The fate of the city is in your hands."
Developer comment on historical authenticity:
"In terms of historical authenticity, we engaged two historical consultants: Dr. Philip Matyszak, who has a D.Phil from Oxford and teaches at Cambridge, and has written 17 books on the ancient world. And Dr. Sophie Hay, who has spent 20 years excavating the ruins of Pompeii. Dr Matyszak helped us to create a game world with historically authentic art, architecture, costumes and customs. And Dr Hay helped out with a comprehensive review, ensuring our architecture and art was consistent with her observations of Pompeii, which was preserved in a very similar time period. We spent over 20 months on this and exchanged 300+ emails and did video flythroughs."
Wouldn't that be like really boring? I mean most of the real events (real in the sense of the more realistic possible, ignoring paintings, poems, tales, etc) are nowhere near as fun as is portraid in the media.
People die all the time in the most boring way (illnesses, accidents), battles are not that epic, no monsters or great heros, overall knowledge of the people are very shallow, etc.
I am actually excited when seeing a historical movie without epic exaggeration. Recently this TV series was my favorite: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10405220/
It presents a primitive material reality, but also the culture and supernatural beliefs.
It doesn't have to be without monsters, it just have to portray them according to beliefs of people of that time, and not according to our modern interpretation, or modern appeal. It could be an opportunity to also document ancient societies, culture, mythical beliefs too.
An addition. Also make a survival mode, where you are not just sightseeing safely, but also have to survive whatever is happening.
I love the historical aspects of the assassins creed games but often grumble that you don’t really get to see much of what day to day life was like for certain groups of people. There was a game pitch I really liked where it followed an immortal person who was winding their way through history. Made it easy to make it into a series.
Think of MS Flight Simulator or Google Street View as documenting the current world. Then take the same approach to thoroughly document the past. The locations, the events, all in 3D VR with realistic graphics, and simulated actors that react to events and react to the players.
Take the current knowledge and physical/archaeological remains of the past, and digitise them, digitally renovate them. Do this rigorously and professionally. Not Hollywood-style approximation, but the work of real historians and archaeologists. Let historians use it and debate the details how it should really look, or how the events really unfolded and adjust it accordingly. Organise the database of content and simulations. AI is possibly already there to automate processing and conversion to 3D of old videos, photos and paintings, even perhaps writings to animation scripts. If not yet, some AI researcher is surely working on that.
Make a VR meta world, where players can travel to certain locations and certain time and interactively take part in the events.
I would pay a monthly subscription for such a thing, to see the past getting recreated digitally. It would be the next best thing we actually could do, compared to real time travel.