More Than a Map
Do you wish you could watch any map, of any part of the world, animate forward or backward in time at will? (screenshots) What if you could then query anything in that map, study all the events it experienced, and watch it evolve with time? What if you could even edit this model world in any way you wished: adding to it, improving it, or even making it your own?
Running Reality offers the ability to render any day of any year, filled (or fillable) with real ships, people, regiments, and roads to the best of our current records and knowledge; not just static national maps frozen in time every few centuries or decades. We at Running Reality think that with all the power our computers have now that we can do a better job bringing history to life.
Running Reality is a free software app for desktop computers (Wait, you are a desktop app?) and also an expansive research project to model the evolution of human civilization.
Broad Scope: Its heart is a timeline that documents history from 3000BC to today.
Parallel Worlds: The baseline can be branched to explore alternate histories, uncertainties in the historical record, and the future.
Functional Governments: Reusable models allow the evolution and comparison of political, economic, and organizational structures from the past and into the future
Interconnected Events: Running Reality will go beyond the mere display of historical events, creating universal interlinked objects that allow it to run like a simulator from any startpoint.
Flexible Scales: Explore or create events on the scale of days or millennia. Detail the road building history of your hometown, or test if civilization is ready to send probes into the galaxy.
Multidisciplinary Reach: Running Reality can be used as a research tool, a teaching aid, a interactive archeological archive, or a discussion forum. Like other crowd-sourced web tools, it will become the utility its users wish it to be.
You can simply browse historical events, using the tool as an animated historical atlas. You can dive in deeper, even submitting new data and models to the project. The Running Reality software will provide you a flexible framework.