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Video with Depth
Lifewolf writes: "A new technology from 3DV Systems uses pulsed infrared illumination to capture depth information for every pixel of a video stream. This allows for neat tricks like realtime keying without need for color backgrounds. JVC is already selling a product based on this, the ZCAM."
The biggest problems are computational; it's hard to do a good job of stereo reconstruction at high frame rates in real time. It's by no means impossible, and there are commercial out there that do it, like this one.
Two cameras aren't really necessary, either, if your camera is moving in the scene. It's possible to recover both the movement of a camera and 3-d information about a scene just by moving a camera through it. Googling for structure from motion is a good place to start looking into those techniques, and there's a pretty cool page about one groups application here.
In short, this company may have an interesting prodect (depending on cost and more details on the error characteristics) but this isn't something that couldn't be done with existing methods.
Also, as an aside, I find it interesting that they take a swipe at laser rangefinders as requiring a spinning mirror, when just about all IR cameras have a spinning "chopper" as an integral part of the exposure system...:)
especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)
Uh, no... I wish it were that easy - but scanned 3D meshes of that quality are still in the domain of laser scanning. There's just so much detail that even the best scanners can't pick up, major wrinkles and folds yes but pores and fine lines have to be simulated with displacement/bump and colour maps derived from the scan data (basically as it scans, the device takes a big long photo of the object to wrap around it later). Once you have the point-cloud from the scan (raw data) there is a LOT of cleaning up to do to get a parametric mesh with correct UVs (texture mapping co-ordinates) for use in production.
For more info, check these guys out - we've used em recently on a couple of film and tv projects and their output is damn nice, but the price tag reflects the complexity and difficulty of the task.
I don't believe nobody has posted about MPEG4. This is very interesting for that -- film using this, and you can encode into MPEG4 format with /huge/ compression almost automatically. The hard part about MPEG4 is object detection; this makes that almost free.
-Billy