Kyle McDonald shared his latest efforts in video capture with me, and the results are pretty impressive. Using a projector and a cheapish PS3 Eye Webcam, he is able to do real-time 3D capture at 60 frames per second. We’ve covered his project before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the live video of it working. The code is currently under development, so if you want to get involved, check out the source code and start hacking!
More:
Incidentally, this is the same method as employed by the PrimeSense sensor, which is the underlying ASIC (custom silicon) behind Microsoft’s Project Natal. It is just one (of many) techniques to build a 3D camera (aka Depth Camera, Range Camera, or RGB-D Camera). Others methods include projected-texture stereo (as employed on the Willow Garage PR2 robot) or time-of-flight (as the Mesa Imaging Swiss Ranger SR400 or PMD Technologies CamCube). You can find out more on Hizook.com
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/03/28/low-cost-depth-cameras-aka-ranging-cameras-or-rgb-d-cameras-emerge-2010
It’s cool to see a grass-roots, open-source effort!