Okay so theres that new playstation 3 game I've heard about where you can put cards in front of the camera, and it detects what card it is (obviously from black and white shapes at the top of the card) and then you see your card turn into a cool 3d moving character that follows your card around. I can guess at how the motion detection is done, and how the card is read...but there is one thing that has completely baffled me...how did they render 3d on top of a webcam picture ?...I mean the technology has been around for ages I guess as it was used in iToy and stuff...but is there some special way of streaming in graphics into direct x so they can be rendered in 3d? If someones knows of any tutorials or even what the method might be called...or hell even if its possible on a pc with directx...please tell me :D I promise i wont code a pokemon card game :P Thanks for reading.

Wow, I always presumed that was the least baffling of all that you mentioned there. They use the same method to grab from the web cam they do for any chat program, render that to a quad (or whatever rendering method they choose).

Check out vmr9 examples in the DirectX SDK