Capturing an object in three dimensions needn't require the budget of Avatar. A new cell phone app developed by Microsoft researchers can be sufficient. The software uses overlapping snapshots to build a photo-realistic 3-D model that can be spun around and viewed from any angle.

"We want everybody with a cell phone or regular digital camera to be able to capture 3-D objects," says Eric Stollnitz, one of the Microsoft researchers who worked on the project.