Our immediate goals for the future have to do with reliable automatic registration methods, and better calibration of the rangefinder system. We are also exploring the development of hardware devices that will allow the simultaneous collection of range and color data.
Our future work is narrow compared to all that could be done to provide better support for dense range images with color. Obviously, real-time acquisition hardware from multiple locations would increase the demand for real-time rendering, so hardware acceleration both in acquisition and rendering are important areas to explore, despite the difficulty involved. The large number of points is, in itself, a demand for faster rendering hardware. In addition, dealing with view-dependent artifacts such as specular highlights could be explored (and has been [25]), where recovery of the surface properties could be performed to more realistically yield the artifacts.