Congratulations, you made a 3D scan from only three images! So where do we go from here? To keep track of where I take this technique next, watch my Vimeo. Here are some things I've been looking into. Feel free to leave any ideas or questions in the comments section!



3D Motion

This only gives us one scan. To capture motion with this technique requires a few more tricks. The first one is synchronizing a camera and projector so we can capture at a high rate. Commercial structured light systems use hardware and special electronics to do this. A DIY approach might use the vertical sync signal from a camera to drive a microcontroller that generates the three phase patterns for a projector. Without real sync, we can get pretty far with a 60 fps camera like the PS3Eye and a 60 Hz projector.



Exporting the Data

Exporting the 3D data for use with other applications is obviously important if you want to do something with the data. Maybe fabricating a miniature, or using the mesh for a character in a video game. A more complex application simply called decode.zip is available from the structured-light project. It can handle exporting into various 3D formats like .png depth maps, .ply and .obj triangle meshes and point clouds. It will also allow you to capture motion as described above. As this application develops, I'll write another Instructable describing how to capture 3D video.



More Accurate Unwrapping

Phase unwrapping, mentioned in Step 2, is a big part of phase-shift scanning. There isn't a single "right" answer to an unwrapping problem given the wrapped phase. However, the flood fill technique is clearly not ideal as it can create regions with large phase discontinuities along straight lines. Better phase unwrapping algorithms could avoid these obvious errors.



Automatic Calibration

We should be able to automatically approximate zskew, zscale and the noise threshold parameters by taking some test scans of reference subjects.



Absolute Position

Three phase scanning can only recover relative position by propagating phases during the unwrapping stage. In order to take absolute measurements of every position in a scene, we can use cosine patterns with many different frequencies, or use a technique called Gray code scanning. Gray codes assign a unique code to each stripe by using 10 patterns instead of 3.



Invisible Capture for Performance

Unless you like the aesthetic of flashing scrolling lines, structured light isn't the best way to capture 3D information on a stage in front of an audience. One solution to this involves modifying a projector to remove the infrared-cut filter and replace it with a visible light-cut filter. Then, with an IR camera, you can see the projected patterns without disturbing the scene in the visible spectrum.

