Radiohead embrace open source

House of Cards is the latest single from Radiohead's groundbreaking album In Rainbows
House of Cards is the latest single from Radiohead's groundbreaking album In Rainbows

Those who haven't seen Radiohead's fantastic video for the single 'House Of Cards' do so now, as it's a remarkable feat in computer rendering.

And Radiohead being Radiohead have decided that while the video is great, it doesn't necessarily have to be the final cut.

The promo was created entirely without the use of cameras. Instead the makers of the video employed, according to the Guardian, visualisations from a scanning system called Geometric Informatics and location shots created using a Velodyne HDL-64E that utilises pulsers from a laser diode.

Open source

All this data is now available for the public to use and create their own versions of the video.

This has come about because of a link-up with the Google Code site, where the information can be downloaded along with a visualiser. Although the music isn't there, you can essentially re-edit the video in an application of your choosing.

Once you have done this, you can upload it to YouTube, where a group has already been created to show off your work.

James Frost, the director of the video, had this very Radiohead thing to say about the project: "In a weird way [the project] is a direct reflection of where we are in society. Everything is [computer] data. Everything around us is data-driven in some shape or form. We are so reliant on it that it seems like our lives are digital."

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.