A camera that can see around corners | Hacker News Reader

A camera that can see around corners

nature.com

152 pointsColinWright21 comments

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Merged into your DNA?!? Have you read the same article as me, or did you get the year 3012 version by accident?

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

Or a mirror.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Mmm. A 3D CAT scan but with light in the visible range instead of X-rays.

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

ENHANCE!

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

Possibly related: https://xkcd.com/538/

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.

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