So real it's unreal...

This impressive short film on architecture is said to be entirely CGI. I was recently at Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum, which is one of the subjects illustrated in the video, and this captures it amazingly well. Though I don't recall any spontaneous indoor cloud formation during my visit.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

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Via MNOL

Transformer Room

A Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Different Rooms @ Yahoo! Video

Via Matt Orsillo

LIDAR Mapping for Archaeology

Another LIDAR example, finding hidden insights about an ancient mayan city by looking through the tree cover. They can see roads, terraces, and buildings they never knew about before.

We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.

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LIDAR Mapping for Solar Access

Sanborn (a Colorado company!) is flying over New York City using LIDAR to create a hyper-accurate 3-D model of the city.

The data will be used, among other things, to create up-to-date maps of the areas most prone to flooding, the buildings best suited for the installation of solar power and the neighborhoods most in need of trees.

Link
Via Planetizen

A designer (Florian Pucher) has created rugs meant to evoke aerial views of different countries and continents. Above is Africa, below is the USA.


Via Boing Boing