Laser Camera Can See Around Corners

Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a laser camera that can 'see' around corners and take pictures of a scene not in its direct line of sight. The camera system fires extremely short bursts of light that can reflect off one object, such as the open door of a room, and then off a second object inside the room before reflecting back to the first object and being captured by the camera, after which algorithms can use the information to reconstruct the hidden scene exploiting the fact that it is possible to capture light at extremely short time scales, about one quadrillionth of a second. By continuously gathering light and computing the time and distance that each pixel has traveled, the camera creates a '3D time-image' of the scene it can't directly see. 'It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays,' says Professor Ramesh Raskar. 'We're going around the problem rather than going through it.'"

Comments

Re:No images

[goldaryn]

http://www.taylorsgardenbuildings.co.uk/store/images/d_9979.jpg

TSA can look up your trousers

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Great, so instead of x-raying or groping travellers, maybe TSA can subtly take a few snaps up the leg of people's trousers and down the top of your t-shirt :-)

http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-now-putting-hands-down-fliers-pants.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/tsa-investigating-passenger/

It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays...

So it's like having vision?

Pics

[Anonymous Coward]

or it didn't happen!

Re:Here's a link to the actual MIT site...

[icebraining]

[quote]Light travels 1 foot/nanosecond(...)[/quote]
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?

Really, foots per nanosecond? I thought it was a scientific experiment.

C is exactly 299792458 ms.

Re:No images

[TheLink]

Here's a related video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU

"Enhance that..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh crap, CSI is real!?!

Re:Here's a link to the actual MIT site...

[argStyopa]

"C is exactly 299792458 ms" ...which is precisely as arbitrary, if more widely accepted, than cubits per moon phase.

I swear, metric evangelism is becoming more rabid every week. Oh wait, I'm sorry, it's becoming more rabid every 2/100ths of a year.

Re:No images

[TheLink]

I actually find the eye-test thing in the later part more interesting.

A "looking round the corner" device is likely to be very expensive and so only useful to a few people.