Skulls in the Stars

Entertainment

John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There?

Entertainment / Horror

I’ll be getting back to some physics posts this week — I promise!  In the meantime, I thought I’d step away from reading old, old classic horror of the 19th century for a bit and look to a different era: that of classic science-fiction/horror.  In the 1950s/1960s, a lot of horror movies with a science-fiction slant to them appeared in theaters.  Many people are aware of these classics — The Thing From Another World, The Day of The Triffids, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for instance — but not as many people may be aware that each of these is based on an original written story.

I recently finished reading the 70-page novella by John W. Campbell Jr., Who Goes There? (1938), and I thought I’d share my impressions about it, as well as its relationship to the two movies based upon it, below.

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Camera-free Radiohead video! (updated)

Entertainment / Optics

(Update: I fixed the discussion on LIDAR speed detection, thanks to edweird’s observations in the comments.)

This is pretty neat. Via Crooks & Liars, we have Radiohead’s new music video (embedded below the fold), for House of Cards, which uses no cameras at all. From the YouTube description,

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

There’s more information on the making of the video at Radiohead’s Google page, where we learn,

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two 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.

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