Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Laser Camera Can See Around Corners

Posted by timothy on from the good-skill-to-pick-up dept.

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.'"

6 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No images by goldaryn · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Re:No images by HateBreeder · · Score: 5, Informative

    Try this:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11544037

    --
    Sigs are for the weak.
  3. It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    So it's like having vision?

  4. Here's a link to the actual MIT site... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/femto/

    Enough of Slashdot's SEO link farming spammy shit. Here's what you want to read, unless you like your science news dumbed down to a third grade level.

  5. And guess what by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The first customer will either be the TSA or some branch of the military.

    High-tech companies would invent anything that would sell to any agency vaguely related to counter-terrorism or warfare these days. If they poured a tenth of the resources they spent developing this kind of devices into finding solutions to the world's real problems, we'd all be cancer-free and solar-powered by now...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  6. hearsay by ei4anb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Slashdot says that UPI.com said that physorg.com said that Tech Radar said that MIT said that there is an interesting paper at http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/58402/656284100.pdf?sequence=1 and the BBC went to learn more, conduct an interview and take photos http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11544037