P3D single shot-single lens 3d digital camera

["Sergio Baldissara" <winter@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm coming back to this thread (2d->3d conversion) because once ago I surfed
on a web site advertising about a device (digital camera+ flash) allowing to
capture a human face in 3d, just in a single shot.
The related software was claimed able to automatically generate the digital
3d "portrait" in a few minutes.
I asked myself  some questions: why flashlight should project a grid? why
faces? I didn't find an answer and nealy forgot the problem, until I found
on this list some postings about 2d->3d conversion. Now I think I've got the
answers.
Why the grid? probably because software reads the parallax of each of the
grid's nodes from the 2d image:if camera's and flash positions are known, i
shouldn't be difficult to (grossly) rebuild in 3d  the photographed surface.
Why faces? probably because the rendering a human face strikes the
attention, but  fractal models of human faces are less difficult to build
than they could seem at first glance: just a 3d police identi-kit! Even the
range of colours  is quite limited, so final rendering could give the
impression of nearly-photo quality. Not enough for
$10,000!
I wonder if I guessed, but probably I did. Anyway  this is VR, not
stereoscopy.
Sergio