Music Video Without Cameras

While browsing Google's 10th birhtday site I ran across a cool video that cought my eye. It gave a behind the scenes look at the creation of Radiohead's "House of Cards" music video.

It turns out the entire video was shot without using a single camera or strobe. Instead, they used two experimental technologies, Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR that capture 3D models in real time. The former was used to create the close-up shots, while the latter was used for the landscapes.

Google also published a data viewer that lets you manipulate the 3D model to get a sense of the data captured, its properties, and size. The really cool part is that you can move Thom Yorke's head around while the video is playing! As a data visualization geek, this sort of stuff really gets me going.