In this contribution we firstly review some approaches to recover the 3D shape of human figures and the related movements. Then we present an improved and reliable version of an easy approach to recover 3D model of humans using just one frame or a monocular video sequence. A simplification of the camera model based on the collinearity condition is required, due to the absence of stereo view. This leads to a perspective or orthographic projection and requires additional information or constraints to solve the problem. The human figure is reconstructed in a skeleton form and visualized with the portable VRML language. Moreover a surface fitting is performed using a pre-defined 3D model obtained from laser scanner measurements.