Longtime Street Tech contributor Mark Crane sent me a link to this amazing Instructable where a guy built a 3D displacement map scanner using little more than LEGO bricks, a Web cam, a Tupperware container, and milk! By photographing sequences of an object being progressively submerged in the milk, and then feeding them into a 3D program that supports displacement mapping, you can create a virtual 3D object from a real one. Ingenious.
Thanks, Craniac!
