Video Thesaurus

This was a project I did (as is this good?) in collaboration with The Light Surgeons for getty images. It was a 14 metre long wall of interactive screens installed at Cannes Lions advertising festival. You would see hundreds of filmstrips playing different videos, and as you walked up closer to the wall, it would zoom in on the video directly in front of you.

The installation displays over 200 video clips simultaneously across a 14 metre long video wall as individual animated film strips that are then activated by a set of Kinects, allowing visitors to browse and interact with them through the selection of different keyword metadata. Each video clip reveals its network of relationships to other clips on the wall, transforming the whole installation into a giant video thesaurus.

To enable each computer play back the 72 x 720×576 videos we needed a custom GPU accelerated codec – if we were running on a mac we would have used HAP, but we didn’t so I created one loosely based off the specs I found on HAP’s github, christened VOM. Also wrote a custom audio engine for the generative audio system.

Interaction was detected with 6 overhead kinects. Driving the screens were 3 custom built PC’s running ubuntu, each with 4 SSD’s RAIDed together, and an NVIDIA Titan graphics card plugged into 8 HD screens with 2 x datapath video splitters.