House of Cards

Radiohead have just released a film clip for their song ‘House of Cards’ which was filmed by capturing environmental data and recreating a 3D scene from the information. The outdoor scenes are particularly compelling, showing fleeting, pointilised versions of urban space.

“No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.”

[image source: HDL-64E Manual]

The Velodyne Lidar system is a roof mounted rotating camera that spins on its axis while shooting lasers in every direction. As the vehicle it is attached to drives through the (your) streets, it gathers data about the immediate physical environment both static and moving that is then transferred into 3D spatial data. This technology coupled with google street-view is an obvious extension of the service generating deep models of city streets accessible from any web browser or mobile device. All generated by a quick drive down the road.

[image source: Velodyne Website]