I can see that being made into very compact 3D Scanners very quickly after launch if that was added as a feature.
Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)
I've streamed 3D video over wifibroadcast¹ to OSVR headset, no fundamental issues. The exact lag depends on resolution, fps, etc settings. It would be superb to cut the delay to sub-50 ms range, but that's probably not going to happen as it would require major rewrite of the H264 stack, as currently there are always two full frames in the pipeline, e.g. in 30 fps it makes 1000/30*2 -> ~70 ms delay². (Note that I'm not the author of the befinitiv website.)
The foundation has released open-source driver stack³ (raspivid etc), but AFAIK they have rather limited resources for software development (single ex-broadcom developer?) and limited access to proprietary features (documentation?) of the Broadcom chipset. Many things work but I think the capabilities of the SOC aren't yet fully utilized.
> Also is it possible to browse the web and e.g. watch videos on youtube with adequate performance on an RPi? (different topic)
No personal experience, but RPi 3 should be okayish for lightweight desktop use (YMMV) with 1 GB of RAM being main limitation for multitasking.
[1] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-tr... [2] https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/latency-analysis-... [3] https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland
It's really not that hard or expensive to do it yourself, and it's a fun little side project. Try it out.
The foundation is overlooking the most unique feature of the Broadcom chipset, the 3D video support. They already have implemented the software/driver side, so only thing required is just exposing the pins from the SOC and adding second camera connector – very low hanging fruit. (The Zero board may not have enough space for routing but the bigger boards definitely have.)