Creating 3D Computer Graphics From 2D HDTV Camera

photon jockey writes: "Everyone knows that holograms are cool! But these three dimensional images are hard to make and need special conditions to view. A group from The University of Tokyo have taken a step toward 3D displays with this paper in Optics Express. Using a HDTV camera they effectively capture the light rays passing through a plane from a lit scene and then reconstruct the three dimensional geometry of the scene. Some pretty movies are available from the same page to show this. The paralax is limited by the size of the CCD and the distance to the object. From the paper: In the field of computer graphics (CG),the use of real images has been attracting attention as a method of attaining image synthesis that results in a more photo-realistic quality. This field of technology is called image-based rendering. The authors have attempted to solve this problem, by applying the approach of 3-D display technology, in which light rays are the most primitive elements of visual cues. "