The Americas History Project was decades in the making. It was a free resource that allowed students to watch any stretch of history unfold. Time periods were navigable via maps that let you swoop in to see depictions of family life and commerce, and swoop out to see data visualizations over any stretch of time. Avatar experts followed you around (when not shooed away), politely extracting your questions and interests, suggesting things to watch next. It had a gigantic amount of mostly-custom content.

Chun presently was watching a geographic visualization of populations through the 1700s. The maps had various kinds of color coding – identifying native tribes and immigrant groups, of course, but also modes that indicated population densities, technologies, languages, areas of conflict and change, and so on. In time-lapse sequences, the different representational modes alternated intermittently to let the student see the evolution along different dimensions, while a narrator (sometimes recorded, sometimes synthesized) described the significance of what was happening.

She had previously watched, with morbid fascination, the rate at which European-imported smallpox decimated a number of regions. She took a brief detour to learn what smallpox was and the way that it killed people, lost interest, and looked for some other area to explore. She poked around and found some interesting items related to the Northwest Indian War. Chun explored a profile of Pontiac, which, through simulated conversation, yielded insights into how this man viewed the world, and then she mulled whether to watch a movie depicting Pontiac's Rebellion. It no doubt could be expected to be an educational movie, which would (Chun assumed) include some interactivity; there was actually a full 80 minute version and an abbreviated 15 minute version.

She stopped and took stock. She knew she could contentedly get lost in the Project for hours—as she had on a past occasion—but decided she'd better focus on obtaining her points. She saw, to her delight, that her meandering had already earned her a point and a half, but she wanted to get more quickly to ten points, and so she re-reviewed the assignment.

The assignment ultimately required submission of a report, but most of it could be verbally recorded, and some flexibility in topic was allowed. The non-negotiable part, though, was circumscribed with the question, "Which population changes in the Americas do you think had the largest effect on the distribution of wealth that we see in the present day?"

Chun mentally wrestled with this for a minute. Was it more about South America versus North America? How wealthy were different countries today? What factors generated wealth?

Fortunately, the assignment instructions provided two coded links into the Project that were strongly recommended. Chun activated the first one, and a narrator provided an overview, as maps of different cities showed relative wealth levels in different cities and countries growing over a three hundred year span. She was surprised to see how wealth was so concentrated within cities.

After just five minutes, she had a solid sense of where the greatest wealth was and how recently it had gotten there.