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What baseline do you plan to use (or what is your expected depth range)?

If money is not a big issue, you could consider buying directly a professional stereo camera. For example, you could search for stereo cameras used in the autonomous car field. The one I know for example:

ZED stereo camera - Depth Range: 0.7 - 20 m (2.3 to 65 ft) ; Stereo Baseline: 120 mm (4.7") : max video resolution: 2.2K, 15 FPS, 4416x1242
stereo cameras from PointGrey
search for companies similar to PointGrey

As these professional cameras are quite expensive, in my opinion what you should pay attention if you want to build your own stereo cameras rig are:

how will you synchronise the streams? Maybe for static scene it could be ok but I think you will need a synchronization signal or the possibility to get a timestamped frame.
you want an HD resolution (1280x720) + a live stream depth map + high FPS: you have to consider that reconstructing the depth map in real time is quite costly. This is not my field but I doubt it is possible currently to compute the depth map with an HD resolution at > 30 FPS on a CPU. You will need to consider to use the GPU in my opinion. In my opinion, don't expect to have a stereo reconstruction algorithm with a high quality and with a good computation time available for free.
I don't think the acquisition backend will be an issue for the webcams you can find on the public market
you should pay attention to the quality of the optic (low distorsion), possibility to manually set the parameters (exposure, shutter time, enable / disable the white balance correction, etc.) and try to have two identical optics

You should look in the hack community, for example the ultra low cost PS3Eye camera. It doesn't have an HD resolution but it has a high FPS, the driver is available on Linux and it is very easy to hack the camera:

What baseline do you plan to use (or what is your expected depth range)?

If money is not a big issue, you could consider buying directly a professional stereo camera. For example, you could search for stereo cameras used in the autonomous car field. The one I know for example:

ZED stereo camera - Depth Range: 0.7 - 20 m (2.3 to 65 ft) ; Stereo Baseline: 120 mm (4.7") : max video resolution: 2.2K, 15 FPS, 4416x1242
stereo cameras from PointGrey
search for companies similar to PointGrey

As these professional cameras are quite expensive, in my opinion what you should pay attention if you want to build your own stereo cameras rig are:

how will you synchronise the streams? Maybe for static scene it could be ok but I think you will need a synchronization signal or the possibility to get a timestamped frame.
you want an HD resolution (1280x720) + a live stream depth map + high FPS: you have to consider that reconstructing the depth map in real time is quite costly. This is not my field but I doubt it is possible currently to compute the depth map with an HD resolution at > 30 FPS on a CPU. You will need to consider to use the GPU in my opinion. In my opinion, don't expect to have a stereo reconstruction algorithm with a high quality and with a good computation time available for free.
I don't think the acquisition backend will be an issue for the webcams you can find on the public market
you should pay attention to the quality of the optic (low distorsion), possibility to manually set the parameters (exposure, shutter time, enable / disable the white balance correction, etc.) and try to have two identical optics

you will have to carefully mount the cameras to align them (fronto parallel view) in order to facilitate the reconstruction step (an object that appears in the left image appears in the same row in the right image, you only have to perform a column search)

You should look in the hack community, for example the ultra low cost PS3Eye camera. It doesn't have an HD resolution but it has a high FPS, the driver is available on Linux and it is very easy to hack the camera:

What baseline do you plan to use (or what is your expected depth range)?

If money is not a big issue, you could consider buying directly a professional stereo camera. For example, you could search for stereo cameras used in the autonomous car field. The one I know for example:

ZED stereo camera - Depth Range: 0.7 - 20 m (2.3 to 65 ft) ; Stereo Baseline: 120 mm (4.7") : max video resolution: 2.2K, 15 FPS, 4416x1242
stereo cameras from PointGrey
search for companies similar to PointGrey

As these professional cameras are quite expensive, in my opinion what you should pay attention if you want to build your own stereo cameras rig are:

how will you synchronise the streams? Maybe for static scene it could be ok but I think you will need a synchronization signal or the possibility to get a timestamped frame.
you want an HD resolution (1280x720) + a live stream depth map + high FPS: you have to consider that reconstructing the depth map in real time is quite costly. This is not my field but I doubt it is possible currently to compute the depth map with an HD resolution at > 30 FPS on a CPU. You will need to consider to use the GPU in my opinion. In my opinion, don't expect to have a stereo reconstruction algorithm with a high quality and with a good computation time available for free.
I don't think the acquisition backend will be an issue for the webcams you can find on the public ~~market~~market (OpenCV should be able to capture the frames)
you should pay attention to the quality of the optic (low distorsion), possibility to manually set the parameters (exposure, shutter time, enable / disable the white balance correction, etc.) and try to have two identical optics
you will have to carefully mount the cameras to align them (fronto parallel view) in order to facilitate the reconstruction step (an object that appears in the left image appears in the same row in the right image, you only have to perform a column search)

You should look in the hack community, for example the ultra low cost PS3Eye camera. It doesn't have an HD resolution but it has a high FPS, the driver is available on Linux and it is very easy to hack the camera:

What baseline do you plan to use (or what is your expected depth range)?

If money is not a big issue, you could consider buying directly a professional stereo camera. For example, you could search for stereo cameras used in the autonomous car field. The one I know for example:

ZED stereo camera - Depth Range: 0.7 - 20 m (2.3 to 65 ft) ; Stereo Baseline: 120 mm (4.7") : max video resolution: 2.2K, 15 FPS, 4416x1242
stereo cameras from PointGrey
search for companies similar to PointGrey

As these professional cameras are quite expensive, in my opinion what you should pay attention if you want to build your own stereo cameras rig are:

how will you synchronise the streams? Maybe for static scene it could be ok but I think you will need a synchronization signal or the possibility to get a timestamped frame.
you want an HD resolution (1280x720) + a live stream depth map + high FPS: you have to consider that reconstructing the depth map in real time is quite costly. This is not my field but I doubt it is possible currently to compute the depth map with an HD resolution at > 30 FPS on a CPU. You will need to consider to use the GPU in my opinion. In my opinion, don't expect to have a stereo reconstruction algorithm with a high quality and with a good computation time available for free.
I don't think the acquisition backend will be an issue for the webcams you can find on the public market (OpenCV should be able to capture the frames)
you should pay attention to the quality of the optic (low distorsion), possibility to manually set the parameters (exposure, shutter time, enable / disable the white balance correction, etc.) and try to have two identical optics
you will have to carefully mount the cameras to align them (fronto parallel view) in order to facilitate the reconstruction step (an object that appears in the left image appears in the same row in the right image, you only have to perform a column search)

You should look in the hack community, for example the ultra low cost PS3Eye camera. It doesn't have an HD resolution but it has a high FPS, the driver is available on Linux and it is very easy to hack the camera:

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