22 January 2009

Microsoft's C-Dragon and Video Synth



I thought I would resurrect this post and talk a little bit more about what I think the implications are for Hypercubist Cinema with technologies like C-Dragon and Photosynth.

These technologies illustrate perhaps the most fundamental aspect of my theory of hypercubism, namely, an aesthetics in which multiple times are visible in the same space.

If the set of a fictional movie were photographed using such technology in concert with some of the multi-camera object-oriented methods and/or scanners, I imagine a robust hybrid system could emerge which would realistically texture map the photos onto detailed clouds of spatial data. The implications for the editing (read: tesseracting) afterward would be tremendous, allowing granularization of every object and every word, every facial expression or movement.

I predict that the difficulty will be in recording sound in such an environment. In a way, we might see a second era of silent films with the emergence of early hypercubist systems. My hunch is that commercial pressure will force new innovations in multi-track recording to the degree that individual sound sources in the same acoustic space will be able to be mixed independently of one another as if they'd been recorded in separate isolation booths. This theme of hypercubist synchronous sound deserves its own post in the future.

PS: sorry for the long BMW advertisement at the end of this video; BMW sponsor the TED talks...

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