A time machine to discover the treasures of French historical heritage

Discovering the treasures of French history through technology is what a virtual time machine promises. A way to discover the jewels of our heritage as you've never seen them before. This is the principle of the augmented walk "The Origins of Paris," developed by the startup Timescope.

The idea is brilliant: discover 2,000 years of Parisian history by combining the real and the virtual. In concrete terms, it involves a guided tour along the banks of the Seine, equipped with a sort of binocular that incorporates virtual reality. We stop at specific points, about fifteen in total, such as the City Hall. We put on the headset and are transported back in time.

We can move, turn 360°, see everything that's happening around us... We're always - physically - in the same place. But we'll see it as it was in the time of the Gauls, then Roman antiquity, the Viking invasions, who attacked on the Seine, then the Middle Ages, half-timbered facades on the banks of the Seine.

A little further on, Notre Dame de Paris was under construction, then came the Revolution, with the guillotine and the great flood of 1910 .

All of this was reconstructed using engravings, land registers, and working with historians. And it gives another vision of history: you are at the same time physically in the present, in the street, which you have just seen with your own eyes, and your brain finds itself in this same space but several centuries later... Another way of understanding History, much more vivid than a paper tourist guide or a Wikipedia entry.

You can also chat with historical figures. This is what the Alsatian startup JumboMana is offering. It has designed interactive terminals that allow you to chat with Van Gogh (you can see them at the Musée d'Orsay), Rimbaud, and even Napoleon.

We find ourselves facing a digital model to which we can ask questions in natural language about their life, their works, a sort of digital twin that takes up the whole story and personality of the original in a very subtle way… Ask Van Gogh why he cut off his ear or Napoleon about what he could have done differently to win the Battle of Waterloo or his opinion on France today. We are far from the old-fashioned guided tour, we almost enter into the intimacy of historical figures…

Virtual reconstructions as a "digital safeguard" of the past are a crucial issue. It is essential to digitize all historical sites in order to preserve their memory for future generations and to be able to restore them if necessary. This is a bit like what we can learn from the Notre Dame fire: that nothing is ever taken for granted, that all treasures can be destroyed, whether by accident, war, urbanization, or even the inevitable passage of time.

We have the impression that monuments and historical sites are there forever, but in the long term, everything is threatened with disappearance, hence the interest in creating digital twins.

This is what another French gem is doing, called Iconem, which builds breathtaking digital twins of all the world's heritage gems from the aggregation of hundreds of thousands of photos. You can navigate them on your computer screen like you would walk through Google Street View .

St. Peter's Basilica, for example, can now be fully visited in 3D as if you were there thanks to 400,000 photos aggregated by artificial intelligence... This will provide very interesting information for researchers, who are not necessarily on site, on geometric precision, the conservation of the walls, the state of the roofs... and even obtain a reconstruction of the city as it was at the time... A brilliant tool for both professional historians and the curious.