Google teams up with Radiohead for laser video remixing

Venture Beat — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:44:43 -0700

If you haven’t seen the music video for the Radiohead song “House of Cards,” you simply must watch it. Maybe its oddness creeps you out, but get this: It was shot without lights or cameras. It was done entirely with lasers.

Using two technologies called Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR, three dimension images of the band were captured as they played the song. In all, 64 lasers were used and rotated 360 degrees 900 times per minute get capture what you see.

Google has teamed up with the band to provide both a making-of video on YouTube and to create an area on Google Code where you can download the data from the video and get instructions on how to create your own remixes of the video. There is also a House of Cards YouTube group set up so that users can share their creations with Radiohead. None are up yet.

I’m playing with the data explorer right now. It’s pretty amazing that it gives you full 360-degree access to the moving images set to the song.

Watch the video below. Again, while watching just remember that no cameras were used.