really great. you need an iphone4, because of the front cam, right?

Thanks, that's right -- either an iPhone 4 or the 4th generation iPod Touch which came out this past September which also have the front-facing camera.

hi grant,
really like the app.
im interested in the theory behind the app, how you are able derive a 3d mesh by adjusting the brightness.
how does that work?

cheers, L.

i dont think its about changing the brightness, he probably just changes the brightness to make it brighter. but watching the video it looks like he shows different patterns, or lights different sides of the face and probably takes different images while doing so he later uses to calculate the mesh.  but i definitely would be interested in the idea behind creating the mesh.

 

Cedric is right, increasing the brightness is to ensure enough light bounces off the object and back into the camera.  The basic steps are surface normal estimation (see Photometric Stereo) followed by integrating surface normals into a 3D shape.  There's a large body of research dating back to  Robert Woodham's original photometric stereo  paper in 1980.  I hope that points you in some useful directions.