http://www.vimeo.com/1513129

That's just neat.

It really is cool, and if its fast it could save a ton of money on lighting and cameras ($20k mini-DV camera vs $100k HDCam camera). And taking the pole out is brilliant, so often that stuff takes a ton of time and money in post.

All of that on a jib or dolly would probably even render out better / faster I'd imagine, too.

I'm just amazed at how good they're getting at finding algorithms to extract the depth mappings to do these things.

~15 years ago, I did a lot of mechanical 3D drafting/modeling, using AutoCad and LightWave. The thought of generating that data from any number of 2D datapoints was simply unthinkable back then. The best we had was a chamber that did 3D laser scanning with mediocre results.

To see it so easily done now, from not much more than a 15-30 degree range of samples, is just mind blowing.