thom

In 2008, James Frost and Aaron Koblin made a video for Radiohead's "House of Cards", shot using the latest LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) technology; cameras which recorded 3D positioning data rather than the usual 2D images. The project earned extra nerd-kudos for open-sourcing a chunk of the data on GoogleCode, under a Creative Commons license. This meant anyone who wanted to experiment with Thom Yorke's 3D head were free to do so (non-commercially).

But not many did, which was kinda sad. So I decided to have a play with it and see what I could make. And what I made was this Android app.

"Thom" is an interactive art piece for touchscreen Android devices. If you don't have a touchscreen device it may still work, but won't be quite as much fun. I'm not going to tell you what gestures do what, it'll be more fun for you to try things and work it out yourself. I've coded in a few 'easter eggs' too.

The app was developed on a Nexus 4 and Nexus 7, and hasn't been tested on any other devices. If you have any old device, or something a little tired, it may not work too well. Or at all. Sorry. Please don't leave me bad reviews just because you didn't read to the bottom of this description.

The 3D point cloud data I used can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/radiohead/. I will share the source code for this app in a similar way soon.

Enjoy!