World History

Welcome If this is your first time visiting, check out the main history map and explore some of the highlights to see what Running Reality is, what it can do, and what might interest you.

See the main map

For Teachers \ Digital History in the classroom can be engaging for students and meet learning objectives. Running Reality can be used free-form or using a structured lesson plan. Running Reality handles other distance learning challenge including integration with learning platforms and providing a safe, secure leaning environment.

Learn More

We at Running Reality believe that we can use the power of today's computers and mobile devices to bring history to life in an accessible, immersive, and engaging way for K-12 students, history enthusiasts, and visitors to historical sites. Running Reality gives you a map that lets you go any place on any date from 3000BC to today and explore down to the street-level of history. This model has nations and cities but also ships, armies, buildings, and people. Towns grow, buildings are constructed, ships explore new seas, and armies battle. Harbors silt in, rivers change course, and cities are sacked and burned. When you are standing at a historical site and using your mobile phone, you can see all the events that happened around you at that exact spot then zoom out to see the context of what was happening more globally.

Map + Timeline

Running Reality can render any day of any year as either a web map or as an app for desktop and laptop computers. The world history model lets you click on any building, place, or thing, study related events, and how it connected to other objects. The model is built from a dynamic database of historical data that the app can manipulate and edit. As more data is entered into the model, Running Reality steadily improves the fidelity of how it renders history. Our goal is to slowly work our way down to street level to the best of our current records and knowledge of history.

A Research Project

Running Reality is an expansive research project to model the evolution of human civilization from around the world. Using our free tools, you can easily browse historical events as an online animated historical atlas. We would also welcome you to join the team and dive in deeper, contributing new data or models to the project. Running Reality makes what it does look easy, but underneath the hood it is a powerful, innovative, and challenging history engine.