Whether at a gallery without wall plaques, visiting a business establishment or hanging out at a friend’s home, having Magnus on your smartphone will let you see what the wall art around you is all about.

Pointing your device and clicking a picture brings up all kinds of details about a given work, including the name of the artist, medium of the work and its dimensions … as well as its price (either current, if available, or most recent if sold and off the market).

One of its more fascinating features, however, is  its comparative software that brings up what the app considers to be related works of art, by type, style and price. It does this by tapping into a crowd-sourced database of 8,000,000 works of art (and growing).

One risk here, of course, it that it reinforces the commodification of art. It is also sort of a strange function in that it boils art down to tastes and preferences … just because another piece looks similar or is priced in the same range does not mean a user should go out and buy it.

Magnus was 31-year-old German art entrepreneur Magnus Resch, known for his work on best Larry’s List, an active database of contemporary art collectors. His response to this kind of criticism: “Why is it ethically wrong to show users prices of an artwork they are interested in?

“If you are willing to spend $10,000 on an artwork,” he continues, “you should know that another gallery put the work on auction a year ago for $7,000 and it didn’t sell. Knowing this will allow the collector to make a more conscious decision.” Of course, for most of us, spending $10,000 on a piece of art is a bit unrealistic, so perhaps the general public is not really the target audience for the app.

This new project brings a whole world’s worth of metropolitan data to your fingertips via both an online application and an upcoming installation at the Smithsonian Museum, courtesy of TED founder Richard Saul Wurman. A rich virtual resource, it represents the work of over 15,000 contributing cartographers and designers from 200 countries.

Collecting and data big and small, static and live, the multi-media Urban Observatory allows (and encourages) comprehensible and comprehensive visual comparisons between cities on various fascinating fronts.

While it continues to solicit data sets to expand its offerings, already people can look into housing and population density of young and old urban residents, transit patterns for cars, trains and planes, open spaces and much more.

Want to learn about how traffic patterns differ between a spread-out city like Los Angeles versus central London, or see how home prices differ between New York and Tokyo in an intuitively interactive way? Now you can do all of these in one place and using a straightforward and user-friendly interface. From its creators: “The Urban Observatory is an interactive exhibit that gives you the chance to compare and contrast data from cities around the world–all from one location. It aims to make the world’s data both understandable and useful. Brought to life by Richard Saul Wurman, Radical Media, and Esri, it is the first exhibit of its kind.”

The spatial installation component is coming to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in 2015. More from VentureBeat: “It was a massive undertaking. Cartographers and computer scientists used big data sets, helped by 3D graphics and Landsat, NASA’s satellite program that captures incredibly detailed images of the earth’s surface, to look back at the last 40 years of city development. It provided scientists insight into how the planet is developing – and how to help save it.”

A tale of two neighborhoods, these graphics (and their hybrid) stunningly illustrate how much further you can get on foot when you take a walk through an urban grid versus the suburban sprawl just a few miles away.

Depicted here are Phinny Ridge in Seattle, Washington (mapped above) and a section of its sibling-city across the water: Bellevue (shown below). As these images from the Sightline Institute show, the grid of streets on the Seattle side puts parks, services and shops of various sizes all within a walker’s reach. On the Bellevue side, there are a few more micro-parks but very few shops, services or large green spaces to be found in a winding one-mile range.

Of course, other examples, including many European cities, show that there is more too the equation than grid layouts. Some urban centers work well with non-rectilinear layouts (circular, for instance), and in other cases sufficient density, public transit or arterial connections make up for twisting shapes of local streets.

Still, these side-by-side (and overlaid) graphics tell a story of surprising contrast in terms efficiency and accessibility in relatively modern contexts. Larger structural differences are shaped and reinforced by building codes, zoning laws and other details that shift from one municipality to the next. These in turn dictate everything from large-scale pedestrian accommodations to road widths, building  setbacks and other details that conspire to form tight-knit cities or allow for sprawling suburbs at both macro- and micro-scales.

From SightLine: “The walkability maps and information presented in Cascadia Scorecard 2006 were developed by University of British Columbia’s Dr. Lawrence Frank, and colleagues Dr. James Sallis of San Diego State University and Dr. Brian Saelens of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and were funded by King County, Washington, and the National Institutes for Health.”