Canadian indie band Young Rival has just released a truly kickass music video for their track “Black Is Good.”
Y’all remember Magic Eye pictures, right? You know, “relax you eyes…” The book series, which featured autostereograms, first debuted in the States in 1993. If you had trouble seeing Magic Eyes, well, you weren’t one of the cool kids. You could cheat, cross your eyes, and see the 3D image in reverse.
Well, Young Rival has just made a “Magic Eye” music video and they’re touting it as the first of its kind.
Here’s an explanation of the process by the video’s director, Jared Raab:
This is where it gets technical. To make your own autostereogram, one must first create a thing called a “depth map” which is a 2D representation of 3D depth information. We collected real-time depth data of Young Rival performing the song using an X-Box Kinect hooked up to a computer. The computer was running software called RGBD toolkit, designed for capturing the depth information from the Kinect using its built-in infrared system. Once we had our depth information, we unpacked it into image sequences and edited these sequences as if they were regular video.
The only difference in the editing process was that depth was represented by luminosity. With much trial and error, we then ran the data through an algorithm which took each frame of depth information, converted it into a random dot stereogram image, and repacked it into the final video. Lastly, there was one more colour pass at the end, and voila.
Young Rival isn’t a stranger to viral success. Back in 2012, their video for the song “Two Reasons” garnered over 800,000 views on YouTube. With this new magic eye video, it looks like they have another sure hit on their hands.
Image via YouTube
