Just days into Radiohead’s experiment with providing data and code for a visualized music video, fan responses are already starting to appear. I’m not sure just how much of Thom Yorke’s face people will want, but the first results do look impressive – and indicate the talent and skill around the world, waiting to be discovered. If there’s any question of the merit of putting the code and data out on open source, this should answer that; it seems the video may well be more than just a gimmick.

Here’s a nice deconstruction below, found in a post at GreatDance’s “The Kinetic Interface” blog. (Could be a good blog to watch if, like me, you’re interested in the meeting place of dance and technology.) It’s the work of “j4mie” (Jamie Matthews), who has a couple of experiments going and more at his personal site. I enjoy seeing these things come together.

I’m a huge fan of Processing, but there’s no reason you have to use that tool exclusively – data is data. Peter Eschler writes via CDM comments that he and Michael Zoellner have ported the data to the real-time X3D / instantreality platform, as a system of particles. That means, in short, you can put Thom’s face up on interactive walls and poke him in the cheek and make his face disintegrate. (And to think, some people doubted this would revolutionize the fan/artist relationship.)

They call the results, shooting and melting his face, “Atomizing Thom.” To translate the data, they had to write a quick Python script that could reformat the CSV data in something X3D could work with. Full documentation on Peter’s and Michael’s sites:

radiohead’s ‘house of cards’ data in real-time 3d [i.document] And with some further updates: Atomizing Thom’s virtual copy [pyjax.net]

I’ve been meaning to familiarize myself more with this platform, so perhaps this will provide an excuse. Here’s one sketch below:

Back to Processing, though, none other than original Processing co-creator Ben Fry weighs in with some thoughts on the

project and the ins and outs of the code written by music video Director of Technology Aaron Koblin.

Radiohead - House of Cards

Parsing Numbers by the Bushel [writing | Ben Fry]

In the latter post, you’ll find Ben delving deep into the particulars of how code is parsed in Processing – very useful if you’re working on your own data visualization code.  Here’s my short translation: you can cast an entire String[] array, not just an individual String. That’s something that comes up quite often, so I may have some additional examples of this soon if that doesn’t make sense, ye Processing coders.

I’ll be talking to Aaron later this week; stay tuned.

And if you work up a sketch with the House of Cards data — rough or polished — we’d love to have the scoop here on CDM, so let us know.

Updated:

exiledsurfer points to Processing and OpenFrameworks templates for interpreting the Radiohead video code. The OFW code is only partially finished; to me, Processing should be easier to work with, but of course if you’re already working with OFW you may want to go with that environment.

Some sketches from the first day of Ben Fry’s Processing class here at Anderson Ranch. What was striking to me is that you really can cover the essence of setup and coding syntax in a day, even for people not familiar with programming/Java. You’re instantly translating code into visuals, so there’s immediate feedback — not a big slog through how the environment works before something actually happens.

Since I have spent some time with Processing, I took the opportunity to try to push some of the examples in a different direction. Speed is not necessarily my forte (with anything, really), but it was fun to try to throw together a sketch as quickly as possible. I didn’t even worry about checking for errors; I actually decided that if the compiler was regularly throwing errors because I accidentally left out a parenthesis, that meant I was moving fast enough. Even though we’re starting at the beginning, though, I’m rapidly filling up holes in my knowledge about Processing and picking up endless tips — it’s really extraordinary to get the chance to work directly with Ben Fry himself! And not only is it an opportunity to get close to the source, but, as I expected, he’s a fantastic teacher, as well.

I’m also trying a new way of working, which is to regularly keep a visual log of what I’m doing. Plaqs’s Skitch, a hot new Mac app currently in beta, takes care of that nicely. It allows me to quickly take screen grabs and post them either to my Skitch page or (as here) Flickr, so I have a record of various iterations — some successful, some less so. More on that and how TextMate makes life easier with Processing coding on Mac soon.

Stay tuned for more…