The other day, Noel Gorelick of Arizona State University and Google Mars fame gave me an amazing demo of images taken with a very cool new 3D live motion video camera that uses LIDAR technology to get a range-finding for every pixel. Advanced Scientific Concepts, the company that built the camera, is so young that they don’t have a website up, but here’s one of the images (moved to the second page because it’s an animated GIF):
Imagine how a camera like this could be used to populate Second Life or Google Earth!
The creators of the technology did a Google Tech Talk about the 3D camera. I haven’t watched it yet, but someone who was there said that the last 30-40 minutes are better than the beginning, so if it doesn’t catch your attention, skip ahead.