I have to admit: when I watch videos like this, I can’t help but think about game ideas. Like the video I posted a few weeks ago with the pencil-sketch war tribes, this makes me think of a civilization-style game where people control tribes, each with their own unique personality, culture, and appearance.

I thought this was a pretty clever use of 3D mapping to change the appearance of a room.

Living Room from Mr.Beam on Vimeo.

[via Fubiz] Pretty cool animation of a dogfight. It seems to be an advertisement for an animated movie.

This is just a cool video of some laser murals in London. As far as I can guess, I think they’re using a digital projector, and they use the laser pointer and a digital camera/webcam to add to the mural. When the camera sees the laser pointer dot, it adds the corresponding location to the computer’s projected image.

Just pretty cool.

Just thought this was pretty cool. What’s next? More accurate architectural models? Sliders so users can see the city in different years and historical periods? Accurate real-time traffic models?

Update: Google Earth already contains historical data. They do this by overlaying old maps over the same location. Though they don’t have 3D models of the locations.

This is from a shirt on ThinkGeek. It’s ten guns from sci-fi movies. As a hint, they also show the year the movie was released. I could name seven out of ten. (Apparently, the “1967″ should actually be “1976″, but that still didn’t help me figure out what it was.) And here’s a link to the shirt.

Heh. I almost wrote “Interesting Interview with Tycho and Gabe” as the title. Anyway, it was also interesting to hear about their beginnings, and their story a company scheming against them.

A friend of mine sent these to me. They’re from March 1942 (four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor), and they are imagined invasions of the US by the Axis powers. I believe these are invasion scenarios imagined by someone at Life magazine, not authentic invasion plans. (Given that they were published in March 1942, they must be imaginary plans because the US wouldn’t have captured some invasion plans so early.) Some of the maps include a “fifth column”, which makes me wonder if they thought German-Americans and Japanese-Americans would rally to support the invasion of the US.

Click here to see the original article with more maps.

On this topic, it’s also interesting to take a look at the Zimmerman telegram. The Zimmerman telegram was the message sent from Germany to Mexico in 1917 (World War 1) suggesting that Mexico attack the United States. It resulted in the US getting involved in World War 1 against Germany.

My only criticism of this video is that it should play faster, and should show the year somewhere. If this is ten centuries, then the years should correspond to roughly:

1000 AD – 1100 AD = 0:00 – 0:32
1100 AD – 1200 AD = 0:32 – 1:05
1200 AD – 1300 AD = 1:05 – 1:37
1300 AD – 1400 AD = 1:37 – 2:10
1400 AD – 1500 AD = 2:10 – 2:42
1500 AD – 1600 AD = 2:42 – 3:15
1600 AD – 1700 AD = 3:15 – 3:37
1700 AD – 1800 AD = 3:37 – 4:20
1800 AD – 1900 AD = 4:20 – 4:52
1900 AD – 2000 AD = 4:52 – 5:22