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Portable, Super-high-resolution 3-D Imaging
An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights. This technology could have applications to industrial inspection, dermatology, and even forensic ballistics."
According to TFA even older, cruder versions of this equipment can "detect the raised ink patterns on a $20 bill." TFA also notes that the way this works is to make the optical properties of the surface of the object essentially uniform. To some extent this is an extension of existing technologies. There are a fair number of imaging techniques that involve doping the surface of something before trying to image it. For example, when one is using an electron microscope one frequently dopes the target with some helpful metal first. But this is a lot easier to run than that and works on the optical range. And the cameras used themselves seem to be not that expensive. This seems a like a really potentially very groundbreaking technology. And it is a good example of how sometimes the technologies that show up and change things aren't technologies that any futurist or science-fiction writer has anticipated. I'll be very interested to see where this technology goes in ten years.
This is somewhat similar to how some artists obtain normal maps for textures.
They go and take source pictures of materials (bricks, grass, what ever), then for each photo they bring a light and shine a light on the scene from four different directions. This allows you to obtain the height information later on back at the PC. This gives you a realistic normal map for the surfaces you've been taking references of. Now, the problem being that this only works with surface deformations of a certain height. Also the angle you place the light at determines how "bumpy" the normal map is going to be. I presume those issues are worked out in the MIT device, but this works for nearly flat surfaces best.... anything else and you'll get "shadows" of objects overlapping each other.
The resolution and scale are what most impress me here though. :)
Eat sleep die
This is so damn cool I don't know why there aren't more comments. I guess it's because there's no real controversy here- it's just cool tech. Quick, somebody claim that this is going to create an invasion of privacy! Or that it will cause climate change!