July 16, 2008

Radiohead New Video, "House of Cards," Created with 3D Data Visualization Tools

Radiohead's new "House of Cards" video (Their YouTube Channel) was created without video cameras. It was created with 3D imaging and capture technology from Geometric Informatics and Velodyne. And the open-source Processing programming language was used to create the video.

"House of Cards"

And here's the making-of-the-video video:

You can learn about this Readiohead project on Google Code.

The "House of Cards" video is open-source and participatory in nature.
Radiohead is encouraging fans to create their own data visualizations and upload them to the song's YouTube Channel.

If you visit this link, you can experiment with manipulating the underlying data with your mouse while exploring different types of visualizations. And if you're ambitious, here's the code that you can download to create and share your own visualizations.

Here's one of the user-generated visualizations:

More About the Software

I'm going to learn more about the software used for this Radiohead project. In the meantime, here's preliminary information about the applications and technologies:

Processing, which I've heard mentioned a few times recently by multimedia artists is described as:

an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

On Processing, I found a link to this video of "Stay Still," which was choreographed by Kim Yunjin and performed by Kim Hyun, and used the Processing application for the on-screen projections:

Geometric Informatics specializes in 3D graphics and used their scanning systems to "produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity" for the Radiohead video. I found two interesting videos about the company's GeoVideo Real-Time Motion Capture system that can be used for capturing detailed facial expressions.

And Velodyne uses its laser systems for measurement applications, which are often deployed for military purposes. For the Radiohead video, their Lidar system used multiple lasers "to capture large environments such as landscapes." Here's a QuickTime video that shows how their laser system can illuminate and capture a ride down a highway.

Learn more about Radiohead's "House of Cards" on Create Digital Motion and Engadget.

Trackback Pings