Realtime 3D face scanning

You can imagine that a low cost, low quality version of something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiY45jALWjE
might create some interesting creative possibilities in a shared virtual environment.
I've found a few 3D scanning systems like this that use projected bands of light. The physical components of these systems tend to be off-the-shelf digital cameras and data projectors, with most of the clever stuff happening in the software. This suggests that the future price of similar systems will plummet as the home-brew crowd reverse engineer the software (Patents de-pending). If a low-cost device could be manufactured to project the correct pattern of light onto your face, your webcam could capture your face, and the virtual world client could perform the necessary processing required to beam you into a shared space.
This systems would allow users in multi-user virtual environment to present themselves in the form of a realtime 'hologram'.
It would be interesting to see how the eye-contact problem present in video conferencing systems, translates in such a holo-conferencing system.