Kinect

Kinect is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console and Windows PCs,  which provide full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities.

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This infrared image shows the laser grid
 Kinect uses to calculate depth.

The depth map is visualized here using color
gradients from white (near) to blue (far)

3D modeling by distance!

                                      From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect