We’ve covered 2D light-painting here before. This project takes things a step further: meet 3D holopainting.

This project’s an unholy mixture of stop-motion, light-painting and hyperlapse from FilmSpektakel, a time-lapse and film production company in Vienna. It was made as part of a university graduation project. (With Raspberry Pis and Raspberry Pi camera boards, natch.)

Getting this footage out was a very labour-intensive process – but the results are stupendous. The subject was filmed by a ring of 24 networked Raspberry Pi cameras working like a 3d scanner, taking pictures around the ring with a delay of 83 milliseconds between each one so that movement could be captured.

They then cut out all of the resulting images – told you it was labour-intensive – and put them on a black background, then fed that data into a commercial light-painting stick. (If you don’t want to fork out a ton of cash for your own light-painting stick, there are instructions on building one with a Raspberry Pi over at Adafruit.)

A man dressed as a budget ninja walked the stick in front of a series of cameras set up where the original Raspberry Pi cameras had been, to create 3D images hanging in the air.

Presto: a holopainting – and the results are tremendous. Here’s a making-of video.

There’s a comment that often pops up when we describe a project like this: why bother? We’ll head that off right now: because you can. Because nobody’s done it before. Because the end results look phenomenal. We love it, and we’d love to see more projects like this!