Radiohead anaglyph

Rock band Radiohead’s latest music video, House of Cards, features a LIDAR visualisation of singer Thom Yorke. This is a quite cool thing to see, but the really cool thing is that they open sourced all of the raw LIDAR data, it’s available for download at code.google.com.

The software that’s provided there lets you play with the data and create your own animation, but I thought I’d do something different. So I downloaded the raw data, played with it for a bit and came up with this:

This is an anaglyph, so you’re going to need some red/blue glasses to see it in its full 3D glory.

So how did I produce this?

1. I downloaded the data and picked a random frame.
2. Every frame is supplied as a CSV file with X, Y, Z coordinates. I used FME to create a 3D shapefile out of this.
3. I loaded that 3D shapefile into a new VNS project as control points and gridded a DEM from it. Added some background terrain (otherwise it’d just be a floating head) and positioned a camera right above it.
4. Rendered with the stereo option in VNS. This actually renders a stereopair of the scene.
5. With the help of an easy tutorial for Photoshop I composited both images into a single image.

So there you have it. Amazing to see all that high-end graphics and GIS software being put to this use… I have to admit this was all a lot easier than I imagined it to be, so I’m certainly going to try out the anaglyph technique some more.