I enjoy Radiohead. I generally like their music. I appreciate the little tweaks they’ve tried to give the music industry. However, the news that their video for “House of Cards,” which premieres next week, was shot not with cameras but lasers confuses and frightens me.

“House Of Cards”, directed by James Frost of Zoo Films, was created utilizing two technologies: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar. The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots. Geometric processed their own data while 510 Systems processed the Velodyne Lidar data. The data was then manipulated by Union Editorial and the Syndicate to create the final result.

Thom Yorke gave this quote to his PR company: “I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn’t meant to be used, the struggle to get your head round what you can do with it. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points–and how strangely emotional it ended up being.” What? Am I going to have to have the images transmitted to my brain? Is there a YouTube for lasers? And if there is, will I have to use protective eyewear to watch it?

Geometric Informatics [Official site]
Velodyne Lidar [Official site]
Laserteque [YouTube]