This would be cool in a futuristic technothriller, or even a supers story (with an AI providing augmented reality, perhaps).
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
An interesting article summarising the research being done in this field: from sensing changes in available light to shining a predetermined light pattern and sensing the reflections. “In their first paper, Freeman and Torralba showed that the changing light on the wall of a room, filmed with nothing fancier than an iPhone, can be processed to reveal the scene outside the window. Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.
[…]
Along with the accidental-camera work aimed at picking up on small intensity changes, Freeman and his colleagues also devised algorithms for detecting and amplifying subtle color changes, such as those in a human face as blood pumps in and out, as well as tiny motions — the trick behind talking chip bags. They can now easily spot motions as subtle as one-hundredth of a pixel, which would normally be buried in noise.
[…]
While Freeman, Torralba and their protégés uncover images that have been there all along, elsewhere on the MIT campus, Ramesh Raskar, a TED-talking computer vision scientist who explicitly aims to “change the world,” takes an approach called “active imaging”: He uses expensive, specialized camera-laser systems to create high-resolution images of what’s around corners.
[…]
When asked about the privacy concerns raised by the recent discoveries, Freeman was introspective. “That’s an issue that over my career I’ve thought about lots and lots and lots,” he said. A bespectacled camera-tinkerer who has been developing photographs since he was a child, Freeman said that when he started his career, he didn’t want to work on anything with potential military or spying applications. But over time, he came to think that “technology is a tool that can be used in lots of different ways. If you try to avoid anything that could ever have a military use, then you’ll never do anything useful.” He added that even in military situations, “it’s a very rich spectrum of how things can be used. It could help someone avoid being killed by an attacker. In general, knowing where things are is an overall good thing.”
What thrills him, though, is not the technological possibilities, but simply to have found phenomena hidden in plain view. “I think the world is rich with lots of things yet to be discovered,” he said.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-around-corners-20180830/
