>The "map brightness to Z" trick would seem to be too simplistic, but it totally fooled me into thinking this was doing some kind of crazy computer vision trick

>The "map brightness to Z" trick would seem to be too simplistic, but it totally fooled me into thinking this was doing some kind of crazy computer vision trick. That got me wondering about what sort of tricks might be out there. For human users, you could use a face detection algorithm to find faces in the image and then place smoothed face meshes (or even just blobs) under them, and you'd have a fake depth-camera that would be pretty convincing until someone put their hand up. Googling around, I found that there's a lot of research being done in depth inference from video. This paper: http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/pdfs/ECCV12-autostereo.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/pdfs/ECCV12-autostereo.pdf is particularly impressive, although given their one minute/frame benchmarks, we'll be waiting 15 years or so before Moore's law can bring this technique to a JS demo.