Are you looking to add the z-axis to your simulations? Well I've tried thinking in 3D, but it still escapes me. Box2D is an open source physics engine written primarily for games. As the name suggests, Box2D is a purely 2D engine. However, Box2D has grown beyond it's humble box simulating roots, and can now handle convex polygons and other shapes coming soon.
Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990's to the present. Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.
"The popularity map shows snapshots of current top artist and album charts by geographical location. The Flash-based interactive map works using data from the Gracenote Media Database and shows the latest artist and album lookups in states, regions, countries, and continents around the world." I like exploring this site as a way to see what the most popular types of music are in different countries. For example, look at the difference in musical tastes between California and Norway. Fun site.
Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces. The design specification calls for the left mouse button to zoom in and the right to zoom out. Unfortunately, Macromedia's Flash, in which this demo was implemented, does not reconize mouse buttons so we have to use the keyboard buttons, even though they are not nearly as pleasant to use.
Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites. About Max...