
A camera that can see around corners - ColinWright
http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-see-around-corners-1.10258
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billybob
Stuff like this just makes me imagine how deadly the Terminators are going to
be. Lightning reflexes, flawless aim, senses that include all light and radio
spectrums, and now seeing around corners in 3D.

~~~
maeon3
They said similar things for the nuclear bomb, humans have the ability now to
make the earth inhospitable for advanced life. War robot flying drones will
replace advancing human armies as rifles replaced swords and spears.

We will live to see the day where humans fighting each other with humans in
planes, humans in tanks, humans in boats and humans with guns will be as
ridiculous as 10,000 years ago where tribes fought eachother with sticks and
bones.

The humans who choose not to adapt will go extinct, I will elect to change by
getting this vision tech merged into my DNA so my offspring get it too.

~~~
omarchowdhury
"The humans who choose not to adapt will go extinct"

I think if you were to adapt towards peace then there wouldn't be any
problems.

~~~
mistercow
Even if you adapt toward peace, the transhumanist with the giant robot dong
might have a reproductive advantage over the guy who opts not to be modified
(I am making some pretty broad assumptions about the desires of women, but I
think that history will bear them out, and anyway, this is just an example).

That said, I don't think maeon3's "genetic transhumanism" view of the future
is terribly plausible. Modifying ourselves? Already started. Flexible genetic
modifications that can do things like giving us magic laser-scatter-vision?
Not plausible.

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tomelders
This can also be accomplished with a camera on a stick.

~~~
guelo
Or a mirror.

~~~
thematt
Those might even be better, since this appears to need a wall near the corner
for the lasers to bounce off in order to function correctly.

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uvdiv
There's an (unrelated) neat trick to see around corners by looking at diffuse
scattered light:

<http://homepage.mac.com/sigfpe/Dual/dual.html>

~~~
Edootjuh
That's interesting too, but differs in that there still needs to be a
unobstructed path to the object from the laser, in which case it could as well
have been a camera.

Still very clever, though.

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colincsl
Is this really much different than current time-of-flight cameras / flash
LIDARs? It looks like a slightly modified version of one of those with a lower
frequency pulse or something to bounce backwards towards the stick person.

Cool, definitely. But maybe not as novel as it may seem.

~~~
_delirium
There's a little bit of discussion in these two papers on the relationship
between LIDAR and the "full" solution to transient illumination:

* <http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/papers/ucsc-soe-08-26.pdf>

* [http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/files/TransientImagingICC...](http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/files/TransientImagingICCV2009LowResolutionMediaLab.pdf)

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Luc
You may also want to watch out for people with telescopes zooming in on the
tea pot standing close to your monitor:

<http://gauss.ececs.uc.edu/Courses/c653/extra/reflections.pdf>

~~~
anateus
A friend's been posting his Lytro photos, and we realized that it lets you
focus unto reflections, thus sharpening them and letting you do things like
reading an out of sight monitor off the reflection on a table that would
usually be too blurry. So you don't even need a telescope anymore.

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oskarth
MIT Media Lab consistently comes up with the most amazing projects. It feels
like the modern equivalent to Bell Labs.

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squarecat
I like to give the team that produced that video a virtual high five (iFive?
oh, previously coined...) as I watched without sound and seem to have been no
less informed for it.

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hcrisp
Great video. I'm not certain, but other time of flight approaches like this
have had limitations in range. First, because light intensity decreases by a
power of 2 with distance traveled, and second, because the MOS gate (if it has
one) sees larger distances aliased as shorter ones. See MS Kinect for similar
issues.

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stcredzero
ENHANCE!

Marvelous achievement. But I hate it when technology confirms the
misunderstanding of a Hollywood hack.

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RyanMcGreal
Possibly related: <https://xkcd.com/538/>

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Edootjuh
This is really interesting. I wonder how the mathematics work of using
different directions to find the locations of bounces, and how much the
accuracy can increase with more directions.

