Now: can you think of some archaeological applications? :)

See this post in Wired.

It’s called ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, but it is way cooler than it sounds. The software, written by a team headed by Qui Pan, a student at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University in England, turns a regular, cheap webcam into a 3D scanner. Normally, scanning in 3D requires purpose-made gear and time. ProFORMA lets you rotate any object in front of the camera and it scans it in real time, building a fully 3D texture mapped model as fast as you can turn an object. Even more impressive is what happens after the scan: The camera continues to track the objsct in space and matches it’s movement instantly with the on-screen model.

I haven’t found a website for this software yet, and I have no idea when/if it is available, but let’s hope it is soon. Should be a boon to those folks who are creating immersive archaeological simulations of real sites & artefacts (Colleen?)

edit: the website address turns up in the last few seconds of the video at 3.16, http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202