Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video data published under Creative Commons license

Eric Steuer, July 14th, 2008

Today, Radiohead released a video for its song “House of Cards.” Directed by James Frost, it’s a beautiful, eerie clip, made with - wait for it - lasers (!), instead of cameras or lights.

[T]wo technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

“Awesome,” you say. “But why am I reading about it on the Creative Commons blog?”

Glad you asked. The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license’s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)

Very exciting stuff. We can’t wait to see all the interesting ways people use this material.