I’m not a Radiohead fan, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be one. It’s just not my taste in music. I will, however, be subscribing to their blog or newsletter or whatever they have as soon as I’m done with this article. After they created a huge buzz by giving fans their album “In Rainbows” at whatever price the fan felt was fair, and now this House of Cards video, I just have to see what else they’re going to do.

They’re not sharks, but they’ve got lasers
What I’m talking about is lasers… a whole lot of them…. to make a music video without cameras. That’s right. We all know that lasers are cool and can be made to do some neat things beyond just being functional, but the band has taken creativity to a new level, blending artistry with technology and innovation to invoke oohs and ahhs from fans and non-fans, alike. Just take a look at the video below and see what I mean.

How it works
Even better than putting out a cool new video in a fun new way is showing how it was done. The whole thing was accomplished with a couple technologies, but with no cameras at all. The two technologies used to form live 3D views of the action were a Geometric Informatics product called GeoVideo and Velodyne’s LIDAR.

All of the close-up shots were handled by the GeoVideo:

GeoVideo is a high-resolution (over 600,000 triangles per frame) 3D geometry video acquisition system that provides 3D surface geometry data recording capabilities at 180 frames per second with real-time rendering for previewing geometry video data. The 3D geometry video data is immediately available for recording. Each video frame is captured with texture information that is aligned exactly point for point with 3D geometry.

To produce all the exterior scenes, the LIDAR gathers points with a couple groupings of lasers:

The HDL-64E operates on a rather simple premise: instead of a single laser firing through a rotating mirror, 64 lasers are mounted on upper and lower blocks of 32 lasers each and the entire unit spins. This design allows for 64 separate lasers to each fire thousands of times per second, providing far more data points per second and a much richer point cloud than conventional designs. The 64 lasers are employed with each laser/detector pair precisely aligned at predetermined vertical angles, resulting in a 26.8 degree vertical FOV. By spinning the entire unit at speeds up to 900RPM (15 Hz), a 360 degree FOV is inherently delivered. Regardless of the spin rate, 1.5 million data points (i.e. pixels) are generated each second, providing an exponentially richer point cloud than ever before possible.

Both technologies are pretty awesome and you can poke at the final 3D viewpoints here. Hit the play button, wait 5 minutes, and then click and drag on the view to alter the perspective. Try the up and down arrows on your keyboard to zoom in, too. You’ll get a better feel for how it works that way.

Give us a remix
Finally, the only thing cooler than showing off their new video and then telling us how it was all done is providing the point data and the tools to remix it. Including myself, over 2,000 people have downloaded the remix materials to make their own version of the sure-to-be-viral music video. The goal is to create your own version of the video and submit it to their House of Cards YouTube group. I think it’s a wonderful idea to inspire others to create and share. So wonderful, in fact, that I decided to poke at it myself.

Once I downloaded everything, I found that it’s nothing more than position/intensity data read into the Processing application by a small script. Being a programmer, I went straight for the code. When in doubt, change values one at a time. That’s what I did. I started randomizing things to change colors and pixel positions, but it gets interesting when you start replacing values with the aptly named frame counting variable, frameCounter. Just replace the last value (255) in the stroke() function call with “frameCounter” and watch the face fade in as brightness increases from zero with each frame count. Below are some screen shots of what I accomplished in about 30 minutes with some light tinkering in the code. I haven’t opened the data files yet.

Now play around with it yourself and see what you can make it do. If you do play, be sure to link to your images or videos from the comments below.