[spacemonkey]

Radiohead recently shot a music video for their song "House of Cards" using LIDAR instead of traditional cameras. More details here...

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

They made some of the data available at...

http://code.google.com/p/radiohead/

Each frame is a .csv file in the following format: (x, y, z, intensity)

-46.874557,92.28398,-252.51682,16
-50.81349,96.73546,-281.1803,15
...

There are 2101 frames total (giving about 70 seconds at 30 fps), for which they were nice enough to provide an .mp3


So, what I'd like to ask is... are there any nice ways to display this .csv point cloud data? I have some elementary familiarity with OpenGL, but don't exactly know how to deal with raw data like this. Is it possible to, for example, interpolate a smooth surface that would cover verteces and apply a shader to it? I'd appreciate any advice and ideas. Thanks.

- spacemonkey

[Oogst]

Hmm, very interesting that they used this kind of data for a videoclip!

The principal problem of working with this kind of data is that you need something to turn the point cloud into a polygonal mesh surface. Just picking the closest points and making triangles with those, will not necessarily work.

You could also just render the points directly as points, but that will not give surfaces, of course.

[Rufus]

A bit late, but you should be able to do all the managing of the data and visualization of it using Matlab. You can probably even find some matlab scripts to generate a 3d convex hull mesh given the point cloud.

[Sxotty]

Does this give 3-D results (via multiple angles?) or just a surface?

When you use LIDAR from one side you dont get the backs, or sides obviously, just a view from one edge so it might seem strange like they are pressing through a sheet.