I work on Google Code. Hearing that Radiohead was going to release data with progressive licensing and wanted to do so on Google Code was awesome.

Now we see how cool it is that the data is open. People like Jacob Seidelin are doing interesting things with it.

In this case, Jacob has created amazing visualizations of the data using JavaScript and Canvas:

I figured it would be a nice little experiment to try visualizing this data using JavaScript and Canvas so I went and did just that. The data is simply point clouds, meaning a whole bunch of points with x,y,z values (and intensity) for each frame. The data on Google Code is about 800 MB, so obviously a bit of trimming had to be done. You can't expect 30 fps with Javascript doing with this kind of data, so I've only used every 5 frames giving us a framerate of 6 fps, not great but acceptable. Then the actual points, each frame has about 12,000 points. No way this will render with 6 fps in any browser, so again I've taken only 10% of the points. Additionally, I've tried to filter away the noise around Thom Yorke's head since that took up a good deal of points. The interesting bit is him singing, anyway. In the end, we have a dataset of about 4 MB (converted to a JS array) for the one minute clip they released.

Now the data is in a more manageable state and the visualization can begin. It's not as good as the real thing, obviously, but I think it's ok (it's best when you look at Thom in profile). The audio clip is as usual played via SoundManager 2 which also gives us free timing information to sync the rendering to. I've played around and made a few different effects that you can toggle on and off (by pressing keys 1-9). While it is playing you can also rotate around the vertical axis by moving the mouse horizontally over the video. Also try clicking/doubleclicking.

Great publicity for Radiohead too. When you are first to do something, that is often the case.

Google has partnered with Radiohead to promote the band’s music video for the song “House of Cards” from the album In Rainbows.

It’s definitely not your average video considering that there were no cameras or lights used: it’s all data. The video uses real time 3D recording, utilizing structured light and laser-enhanced scanners. Google is hosting the interactive video application at code.google.com and providing an iGoogle gadget for the video and application.

The video was created by music video director James Frost, and the technology was handled by Aaron Koblin, who has done several other visualizations including the well-known flight pattern visualization.

To capture the 3D images, they used a structured light scanner from Geometric Informatics for the close proximity shots of the singers and a Velodyne LIDAR scanner for the landscapes. The LIDAR scanner uses 64 lasers to scan an environment and create an XYZ point cloud of data, which is then rendered and read by 3D software.

Radiohead got a lot of attention when it released its album In Rainbows for free online. This led to a lot of speculation about the future of the music industry and the way people will purchase music.

Since Radiohead identifies itself with the open-source ethos, it’s releasing the video’s data so that developers can remix it and make their own variations of the music video. You can download the viewers and data from the Google Code project page.

That page also has an in-browser data viewer for viewing and interacting with the video. The player is Flash-based, so you can zoom with the mouse wheel, or click-and-drag to move it around. The page also has links to the YouTube video, the YouTube group (for user-remixed videos) and the behind-the-scenes video.

This project may have interested Google because the LIDAR technology used in the landscape and large environment shots is similar to the system Google uses for their Google Maps Street View project. It’s just a very different application of the same technology.

Also see Aniboom’s contest where cartoonists are encouraged to create music videos for Radiohead songs.

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