It’s become increasingly easy for the average person to create 3D models of objects simply by taking lots of images. This problem is also known as multiview stereo, and many ways to approach it are discussed in Section 8.3 of the book.

Recently a team of volunteers went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to acquire lots of pictures of classical sculptures, which were then processed into 3D models using Autodesk’s 123D Catch software. This free multiview stereo software makes it really easy to make your own 3D models. The multiview stereo algorithms under the hood are from acute3D, a French company that had a great presentation at CVPR 2012.

This article from MakerBot and this article from the Creative Project have more details and pictures from the project.