News

ChronoZoom wins Interactive Award at SXSW conference

March 13, 2013

ChronoZoom was named the Top Educational Resource at the 16th Annual South by Southwest Festival Interactive Awards Ceremony in Austin, Texas.

ChronoZoom started as an idea from a University of California, Berkeley student, Roland Saekow, taking a course about Big History taught by Walter Alvarez, Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science.  The idea was to create a digital tool for exploring the history of everything.

Last March, Alvarez and Saekow teamed up with Microsoft Research Connections engineers to make this web-based software a reality. A year later it is a dynamic, zoomable timeline that starts with the Big Bang and ends with modern history. 

To view ChronoZoom go to their website here.

This collage demonstrates how the time scales for the cosmos, Earth history and the histories of life and humanity span a range of a million billion, making it impossible to view them together on the same timeline. Using zoom technology from Microsoft Research Connections, ChronoZoom allows you to zoom easily from one timescale to another, and imbed multimedia that tell the history of everything. Photo: UC Berkeley News Center