( CNN ) -- The most startling thing about the music video for British band Duologue 's song Memex is n't the ghostly way the slow-panning camera turns human skin into a landscape . It 's not how the model , actor Beryl Nesbitt , manages not to blink . And it 's not how at 3:30 in , with just a change in the lighting , the tone of the video abruptly gets dark and sinister . Rather , the most startling thing about the Memex video is that none of those hyper-realistic shots are photos . It 's a virtual 3-D scan of a human body , in this case , British actor Beryl Nesbitt . The knowledge that it 's virtual reality makes watching the video a little like seeing a Chuck Close for the first time : Your eyes initially registered a black-and-white photograph of monolithic scale , and it takes a few beats before you can believe that it 's a painting . London-based creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast—great name ! —made the video for the band ( and their friends ) Duologue as an deep dive experiment into filmmaking for virtual reality . Hollywood has been using various kinds of 3-D scanning technology for years—films like Avatar , and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , relied on it . But for the Memex video , the creators used 94 cameras , whereas some Hollywood studios have been reported to use seven , to capture Nesbitt 's glowing skin in the most microscopic detail possible . `` We were trying to push the realism of it , '' says Barney Steel of Marshmallow Laser Feast . The team is interested in the combination between photogrammetry—the science of taking 360-degree measurements from photos—and panoramic high dynamic range lighting , which is like photographs of light from all positions and in myriad settings ( for example , it could be moon lighting , or desert lighting ) . Once they recorded both Nesbitt 's skin and a range of light , they worked with London visual effects studio Analog to merge all that visual data . The result is a high resolution , immortal , portrait of the actor 's skin . Of course , the Marshmallow Laser Feast team could have created a similar music video by just filming Nesbitt . `` Our ambition was to create the model at a really high resolution so we could take it to a games engine environment , '' Steel says . `` At the moment we 're treating it like a sculpture . But if you spend enough time you can rig it to be exactly like a face . The software is out there to animate it like a motion capture . '' That said , the Marshmallow Laser Feast team is n't trying to create a 3-D human scan that will show up in a scripted film or video game . They create large scale , mind-bending installations out of light and sensors , like Light Forest , which turned an entire room into an instrument of light and green lasers . So their objective is to find a way to loop virtual humans into their artwork . `` The exciting thing about virtual reality is it can give you a sense of presence that does n't exist in other technology—and it feels like we 're on the edge here , '' Steel says . `` The limiting factor is how realistic those little bubbles are . We 're interested in powerful experiences where you 're not bound by any of the restrictions of reality . '' Read more from WIRED : . Haunting Photos of the Children Toiling in Egypt 's Limestone Mines . Unexpected Shooting Targets Used by the World 's Armies . Someone Reinvented The Butter Knife And It Is Amazing . How to Fix Your iPhone 's Annoying Autocorrect . Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $ 1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT ! Click here ! Copyright 2011 Wired.com .
A London studio has used 3-D technology to create hyper - realistic images of the human body for a music video . The studio used 94 cameras and panoramic lighting to capture the skin 's microscopic details . The studio aims to incorporate virtual humans into their art in exciting ways .