Walking in New York can at times feel a little too smooth: the rationality of the grid and subtle grade changes conspire to hide the natural terrain beneath all that asphalt and concrete. That’s not the case in the Bronx, the city’s mainland toehold, where topography is at play like nowhere else in this archipelago metropolis. [...]

It was with this conspicuous role of the Bronx’s topography in mind that we approached Kris Graves, a New York-based photographer [...]. — urbanomnibus.net

This new, partly digital sand table interface developed for military planning would seem to have some pretty awesome uses in an architecture or landscape design studio.

Using 3D terrain data—in the military's case, gathered in real-time from its planetary network of satellites—and a repurposed Kinect sensor, the system can adapt to hand-sculpted transformations in the sand by projecting new landforms and elevations down onto those newly molded forms. — BLDGBLOG