Redesign Arcade Fire’s latest music video through your smartphone

Though the technology behind music videos has come a long way since Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing premiered on MTV Europe, it hasn’t quite caught up with the respective changing worlds of movies, music and TV. With their video for “Reflektor” Arcade Fire has taken the release of their latest single to a whole new level – in a nutshell, the technology behind the “Reflektor” video allows you to paint effects on the screen with your smartphone whilst the video plays.

The way it works is when you link your smartphone with your web browser, thereby syncing the visual tracking from your computer’s webcam, and the data your phone provides through its gyroscope and accelerometer. This allows the phone to become a tool to manipulate whatever you’re seeing onscreen, giving you the space to alter every scene in the video. You can change each effect by modifying the distance and angle of your phone to the computer screen.

Whilst a traditional shoot still took place on location in Haiti, a specialist team implemented the new technology through the post-production process. Luckily for other developers, the team chose to make the code open-source, as well as go a step further by giving users a tech page portal through which they too could tweak the set-up of the video – something that would apply in real time. The most groundbreaking part of the video hits towards the end of the video, which you can discover here – since the project is a Google Chrome experiment we would recommend downloading that first (if you don’t have it).