ano.malo.us pretty typical actually..

Posts tagged house-of-cards

Rainbow Lights

In posts on 17 July 2008 tagged house-of-cards, processing, radiohead, visualization with no comments

I’m having too much fun with this Radiohead stuff. Made another late-night attempt thanks to a certain Fat Weasel (you Trader Joe’s fans know what I’m talking about). YouTube’s compression deteriorates the quality quite a bit but the original is over 500MB. Anyway, here’s the Youtube video:

And here are some screencaps from the full, uncompressed video:

House of Shader

In posts on 16 July 2008 tagged house-of-cards, processing, radiohead, visualization with 1 comment

Using NodeBox to visualize the Radiohead House of Cards data was fun but NodeBox proved to be too slow on my laptop (I think CoreGraphics has moved onto Intel while I’m stuck at G4)… so I decided to download Processing and give it a whirl.

I tried creating a smooth shader-like look by using ellipses to render the data points and faking Gaussian smoothing by hackishly using multiple ellipses with varying Alpha levels. Looks decent but not too exciting.

The jerkiness and unnatural movement of the ear are due to the intentional noise added to the dataset by the creators and not an effect of the motion capture technology (as explained here).

Gotta admit, I do like Processing… even though it makes me use curly braces. It was easy to learn quickly (same concept as NodeBox and other procedural art environments) and the use of Java didn’t get in my way too much.

Radiohead + Google + Python

In posts on 15 July 2008 tagged house-of-cards, nodebox, radiohead, visualization with 5 comments

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? ;)