Messing with Thom Yorke’s head

Radiohead’s latest music video was shot without cameras. Instead, they used a combination of reflected light and lasers to generate clouds of points in 3D. Google was nice enough to provide the rest of the world with some of the 3D point cloud data collected for that music video. A big piece of that data is about 2100 frames of lead singer Thom Yorke’s head. A frame of the original data (when output via Processing) looks like this:

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the point cloud is really noisy around the edges. A simple high-pass filter later and that same frame looks like this:

That’s a little more manageable. I figured, why stop at point when you can have 3D surfaces? One of the more straightforward ways to make a 3D surface out of a bunch of points is to stick a bunch of triangles in between the points, creating what’s called a Delaunay triangulation. This is a really compute-intensive calculation and I don’t exactly have a supercomputer on hand, so I did a lot of fudging and approximation. Even with all that fudging, each of these frames took as much as 5 minutes to render. This process has been running for most of last week while I’ve been at work. That same frame above looks like this when Delaunay-triangulated:

Notice that it’s a little noisy, which is mainly due to some approximation on my part as well as some leftover noise in the point cloud. The video below shows what happens when you sequence all 2100 frames together. Enjoy!

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