You might at first think that all of this is an impossible task because you need stereo vision and hence a pair of stereo photos to work out depth. Once you have a depth map you can apply it to the single image and create a stereo pair which can be viewed as a stereoscopic image. The algorithm attempts to construct a depth map of the sort the Kinect creates but without using a Kinect. This is all about taking a simple 2D image and working out how far away from you each of the objects in it are. This time it's a library of code that converts a 2D video or still image into a 3D depth image. Microsoft Research has been hard at work doing impossible things again.