Would You Like To Have A Camera That Sees Around Corners?

Scientists at MIT, Harvard, and Rice University have come up with a way to photographically capture the rough shape of objects out of a camera's line-of-sight. The camera untangles bursts of light that's reflected off surfaces it can see. Sounds pretty intense, right? PC Mag's Damon Poeter dives into the details about how the camera work-

The way it works is by shooting several rounds of femtosecond laser bursts at a wall that faces both the camera and a room hidden around a corner. The laser light bounces around the hidden room and returns back to the detector, which measures the time taken for that light to return and the angle at which it returns. That data is enough to describe the basic geometry of the hidden room and any objects inside it, so long as you've got the right reconstruction algorithms and enough computational horsepower to do it. 

And lo and behold, the researchers have managed to demonstrate the principle working in real life (video below). The technology is still at a pretty early stage, however. The team's camera is "able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimeter depth precision and centimeter lateral precision over 40 cm-by-40 cm-by-40 cm of hidden space," which sounds very impressive until you see the fairly distorted reproduction of the hidden, three-dimensional object they set out to capture.

Ideally, this could be a very beneficial tool for law enforcement to use such as firefighters and police. Capturing evidence just got easier.