
Accidental Pinhole and Pinspeck Cameras (2014) - arseny-n
http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/research/accidentalcameras/
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tgb
Relatedly, the fact that light is reversible (behaves the same forward in
time/direction as backwards) means you can swap the light source and camera of
an image (if just one point lightsource). I.e. you can render the scene from
the perspective of the light source as if light were emitted by the camera. I
recall seeing a neat demo of this but I can't find it on google. Anyone know
it?

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tim_hutton
e.g. Dual Photography:
[https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/](https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/)

~~~
joshvm
Figure 12 is wild. They take an image from overhead a scene - a box which
contains a mirror (perpendicular to the camera so you can't see the surface)
and some other objects. They illuminate from the side (shining into the
mirror) and are able to reconstruct that view. That is an image _facing the
mirror whose surface the camera can 't see_ and it correctly shows
reflections.

~~~
laughinghan
Did you see Figure 16?? The camera is pointed at the back of a playing card
(like, from a 52-card deck), and the front is faintly reflecting light onto a
book, and they're able to reconstruct a shockingly clear image of the front of
the card (King of Hearts, spoilers).

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fanatic2pope
See also "non line of sight" imaging.

[https://biostat.wisc.edu/~compoptics/phasornlos20/fastnlos.h...](https://biostat.wisc.edu/~compoptics/phasornlos20/fastnlos.html)

~~~
fartcannon
Incredible. And with the various upscaling/denoising neural networks kicking
around, I imagine we can clean all these novel methods of seeing
around/inside/through things up to where they're nearly perfect.

I don't know why this strikes me as so incredible, but it does.

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ChuckNorris89
Your optical mouse sensor is also a low res camera. In older models you could
dump the picture through a debug mode.

Also, LEDs can also act as light sensors. Food for thought.

~~~
alok99
The 8-Bit Guy recently did this in a video. The whole thing is worth a watch,
but the image he read from a mouse is here:
[https://youtu.be/xWB9dP1AtDU?t=490](https://youtu.be/xWB9dP1AtDU?t=490)

~~~
jentist_retol
A word of warning: 8-Bit Guy has some interesting videos, but his restorations
of vintage hardware are really damaging to the hardware and generally poor
quality (even if the final result looks fine). I guess it's fine if he sticks
to a 2600 or something, but some of the stuff he's done destroys rare hardware
with real historical significance.

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Miraste
Can you give an example? How are the restorations damaging?

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jentist_retol
I guess I should have.

\- He uses retrobrite frequently. This is a controversial practice
(personally, I'm against it). Basically, restoring a yellowed case to a
closer-to-original color. The long term effects of this process are unknown
(some speculation is that it makes plastic brittle, which is bad enough
already on some of this older hardware) - it's probably okay to do it to an
Apple II, but maybe not rarer hardware.

\- His work is shoddy - frequently, he powers on 30+ year old machines without
inspecting the caps. He uses a screwdriver on metal to clear adhesive. When a
component is malfunctioning, he does't have the capability to examine it with
a scope - sometimes, it's just a bad joint you know?

\- He runs an entertainment channel. This means he moves fast. It leads to the
above shoddy work but also means that he needs a complete project for video
views - 8bg will spraypaint a faded case to a new color and call it done.

\- RaspberryPi conversions. Man, I hate these. Let the thing be the thing that
it was and let a Pi be a Pi.

And you know, this is probably fine for commodity hardware like TRS80s and
Apple IIs. And, he does a good job of cutting videos showing logical
progression to make them easier to watch. But, you'll notice that he never
does workstation, graphics, or other esoteric hardware - that stuff is a
legitimate challenge to restore aside from cleaning goop and retrobriting the
case.

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m0nty
I had this happen when I put up some shutters in my room. There were about six
ventilation holes at the top of each one, and the scene outside was projected
onto my wall on a bright morning. It was unexpected, and unexpectedly
beautiful.

~~~
smogcutter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura)

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eslaught
> A shadow is the negative picture of the environment around the object
> producing it.

Just screams to be the plot for a mystery novel/movie of some sort.

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Shermanium
this brings to mind the scene in BLADE RUNNER where Deckard analyzes the
photograph

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pontifier
I'd never heard of anti-pinholes before. It's a fantastic concept.

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yangikan
Is there a recent follow up work?

