There's something you don't see every day. (Via.)
The White Glove Tracking project got a lot of people who probably should have been working to identify the location of Michael Jackson's famous sequined white glove in every frame of his 1983 TV performance of Billie Jean.
Then they made this video.
The video is just one - relatively trivial - example of what you can do when you turn elements of moving video into separately manipulable data, and then start fooling with that data programmatically, in this case with Processing. There are several more examples on the whiteglovetracking.com gallery page.
Another, different but related, concept:
Making 3D models from video clips (via).
11 January 2008 at 9:30 pm
That second video clip is absolutely spectacular. I've heard of things like this and even seen some very rudimentary concepts, but this is amazing. Imagine all the hard work this will save 3d modelers, making those stupidly high budget video games a bit less expensive (or, more likely, simply even *more* detailed). As someone who's dabbled in 3d modeling but never really gotten into it due to the nitpicky complexity, this realllllly excites me.
12 January 2008 at 1:18 am
So any guesses on what Video Trace will end up costing? 'Cause I have got to own that!
12 January 2008 at 1:10 pm
The video trace stuff is quite impressive, but Microsoft Photosynth is absolutely astounding. I recommend watching the TED video first - it goes from "that's fairly useful, I guess" to "holy sweet mother of god he did what?" at around the four minute mark.
In brief (if you've got time, it's really a good idea to watch the video first - the reveal is awesome), they've synthesized a model of Notre Dame cathedral, entirely from pictures off of Flickr.
If you've got a decent video card, you can play with the data sets they've got on their website. It's even Firefox compatible.