[cdtwigg]

Space carving is a similar idea [Kutulakos and Seitz, 2000]: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kyros/pubs/00.ijcv.carve.pdf

[doctoboggan]

Very interesting. I knew I was not the first to think along these lines, I just was not sure what terms to google for prior research.

[sillysaurus]

You may also enjoy http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~smr/papers/rt_model/rt_model.pd...

http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/proj/3dscanning/

Or you might find some things of interest in my article collection https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index_no_im...

(No doubt Dropbox will disable my public links soon. I wish there were an easy way to mirror my Dropbox folder to S3.)