This reminds me of MIT’s work on femto-photography to see around corners. They used ultrafast laser pulses to bounce light off walls, capturing the reflections from hidden objects. By analyzing the time-of-flight data, they could reconstruct 3D shapes of objects not in direct view.
<https://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/cornar/>
The title from the video was changed to "What if we made a camera that sees in reverse?" which is more fitting since "seeing behind walls" was a bit clickbaity since the camera is mounted big arm literally peeking with a mirror.
The guy made a home made camera with orthographic projection, that should been enough for the title...
Amazing engineering here, but isn't this equivalent to raising your camera above the wall and then snapping a pic? This wasn't really seeing behind walls in the sense I expected.
The idea of a camera that can design its own lens by shifting the sensor in a large area is interesting on its own, but the 'hook' is it can "see behind things" by being so large.
The title appeals to a broader audience, and technically it's true, if comparing to any typical camera or working human eyeball arrangement.
It's a bit different than that since the image perspective is as if the camera is directly in front of the wall. Normally if you take a picture from above the wall, the perspective is from the angle of the camera pointing over the shoulder of the wall.
The orthographic image is the coolest thing I've seen in a while! This is some remarkable engineering. I expected the images to be much lower quality but they look great.
