Radiohead + Google + Python
Radiohead (cool) collaborated with Google (cool) to create a music video using lasers (cool) and 3D scanning devices (cool) instead of cameras and then released some of the resulting data under a CC-license (cool) and put it up on Google Code (cool) to let the internets muck around with it (cool). With so much awesomeness, how could I possibly go to bed?
The Google Code site for the project includes data as CSV files with x,y,z and intensity per data point and some source code for the Processing environment. The data points are actually much denser than the Radiohead video’s style implies, making possible all kinds of visualization. I haven’t used Processing before but have experimented with NodeBox and since the data files are simple text files, I had no problems writing a quick script to render the data. Even a simple 2D grayscale scatterplot looks good without any interpolation or smoothing.
Keep in mind that no regular cameras were used in capturing this and the data is in 3D and just begging for being imported into a proper modeling application. I tried making an animation but the poor laptop can’t handle it and the xgrid is working on some data.. and it’s for lab work anyway, right? ;)
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