Architecture drafting tables, we weep for thee

Make the Logo Bigger introduces us to Video Trace, a 3-D modeling program that makes it head-slappingly easy for a user to trace images from video stills and quickly create complex architectural diagrams. It's also a bit scary, if you follow the video all the way through, how it allows users to manipulate video images and alter the "reality" before your eyes (watch the truck clone itself).

Wonder what happens when creating opinions about the world's news moves from web sites and blogs to editing the actual video images.

It's official. Google is now mapping your office plants.

We love Google Earth, a free program that lets you zoom down onto Mount Everest or the White House and see 3-D maps of the world. But Google's latest update is freaky. Now, you get photo-realistic illustrations of buildings in major cities and set the angle of sunlight just so.

Pretty soon, you'll peer inside a window and see yourself peering back out.

Downloadable here.

Johnny Lee and the viral petri dish

It's amazing to think that one researcher, working alone in a lab, can have an idea and reach millions of people in just a few weeks. The brilliant Johnny Lee did this with his Wii video game remote hacks, in which he creates a stunning interactive whiteboard and 3-D system for less than the cost of two movie tickets and a large popcorn. Not only is Johnny brilliant, but he posts his software for free on his web site for the world to download.

It's a nice two-step case study in viral marketing, where the idea is extraordinarily catchy ("researcher creates revolution in video games with parts from RadioShack") and the distribution network amplifies it ("YouTube users go nuts, viewing original video 4.5 million times"). Social media has creating a toasty-warm petri dish for viral communications.

It's also a nice touch of humility to see Johnny trembling a bit on the TED conference stage, perhaps awestruck at the fandom he has created so fast with a little help from YouTube. The guy just gave the 2.7 million teachers needed in the United States a presentation tool they never could have afforded before. Johnny, it is we who should be trembling to accept such grace from you.

Speech tip via Boing.

(Correction: It has come to the editors' attention that petri dishes are used primarily for growing bacteria, which are very small cellular creatures, but not as small as viruses, which are sub-microscopic agents that grow and reproduce inside host cells. Thus the metaphor of this headline, "viral petri dish," makes no sense biologically, and may not be a metaphor at all but instead an aphorism, since it hints at a concise statement of scientific principle, except that the statement is false. We sincerely regret the false aphoristic metaphoric viral petri dish error.)

Johnny Lee and the future of 3-D

Carnegie Mellon brainiac Johnny Chung Lee has figured out how to make three-dimensional images on a flat panel appear to float in space in front of the screen, using a Nintendo Wii motion detector. The illusion is stunning. Fake Steve is drooling.

Lee gets bonus points for posting the software for developers here. Watch the end of this clip to see how the screen can become a portal, so it appears you're looking into an alternate reality "room" through the panel. The Matrix is coming.