Processing Images with Depth Information
If you want to work with depth based cameras you can go for Time of Flight(ToF) cameras like picoflexx and picomonstar cameras. They will give you X,Y and Z values. Where your x and y values are distances from camera centre of that point (like in 2D space) and Z will five you the direct distance of that point (not perpendicular) from camera centre. 
For this camera and this 3d data processing you can use Point Cloud Library fro processing.
I've been doing a lot of Image Processing recently on Python using OpenCV and I've worked all this while with 2-D Images in the generic BGR style.
Now, I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate depth and work with depth information as well.
I've seen the documentation on creating simple point clouds using the Left and Right images of a Stereocamera, but I was hoping to gain some intuition on Depth-based cameras themselves like Kinect.
What kind of camera should I use for this purpose, and more importantly: how do I process these images in Python - as I can't find a lot of documentation on handling RGBD images in OpenCV.