History of the world

Microsoft TechForum, an annual event hosted at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., offers a showcase for its latest concepts. Several of the prototype products displayed this week have been under development for years and signal a bold direction for Microsoft--and potentially for consumers.

Here, a Microsoft rep shows off ChronoZoom, an open-source community project that visualizes the history of, well, everything. Users can explore events "between scales of one year to billions of years, putting historical episodes in context, comparing vast amounts of time-related data across different fields," according to Microsoft Research. The company is working with the Big History Project to flesh out the data, which includes biology, astronomy, geology, climatology, prehistory, archaeology, anthropology, economics, cosmology, natural history, and population and environmental studies

Keep an eye on this site for the open-source release later this year, or check out this keen ChronoZoom demo video.