FLORENCE, Italy — Art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini has waited 30 years to get to the bottom of his biggest mystery yet: whether Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest lost fresco lies behind a wall in the Palazzo Vecchio here.

Seracini’s team of 30 will scan the palazzo’s 177-foot-long wall in mid-November, looking for the Battle of Anghiari, a work so magnificent it has been called the “school of the world.” The $1.5 million search expedition will jump-start a multidisciplinary conservation program at the University of California at San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Virtual-worlds platform developer Multiverse Network is set to announce a partnership Tuesday [October 9, 2007] that will allow anyone to create a new online interactive 3D environment with just about any model from Google’s online repository of 3D models, its 3D Warehouse, as well as terrain from Google Earth.

The Cochrane-Woods Art Center and the Smart Museum will soon be in Google Earth. The buildings were recreated by Dale Mertes from NSIT. Google Earth is installed on my (Megan’s) computer. Please stop by my desk if you’d like to see our building “in situ”. Learn more…

We believed that slide projectors were no longer in production. The VRC was wrong.

Slide projectors like the one on the left are still being handcrafted in Lyon, France and distributed by Hammacher Schlemmer.

Perceptive Pixel

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo:

View Demo