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Lovely data

Via Joi Ito. The new single from Radiohead’s In Rainbows has a trĂ©s cool music video. No cameras or lighting were used in the creation of this work, but it’s not just another yawn-worthy CGI affair or animation. Two (admittedly somewhat expensive sounding) technologies – Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR – were used to capture some 3D images – ie a truckload a data.

Below is the “primary” music video that was produced – it’s nice enough in itself, but the genuinely cool part is what they have done with all that data. It’s been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License at the Google Code site. Likewise you’ll find the software, under the Apache License 2.0.

Lots of remixes already in the YouTube group.

Check out the collaboration page, in particular where you can explore the data through the 3D Viewer – I think this in itself could be the music video – ie, there is no one single experience of the data, and every time will be different.

Of course, lots of potential for mindless gimmickry with this, but there’s something deep within this which is profound and lovely, so beauty will emerge as well.

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