SCIENTISTS RECONSTRUCT AN OBJECT BY PHOTOGRAPHING ITS SHADOW
Via Wired:
They demonstrated the trick in a windowless room on the Boston University campus, where Goyal works as an electrical engineering professor. In the room, a flatscreen monitor displayed a series of crude drawings created by Goyal’s graduate student, Charles Saunders. Among them were several masterpieces: A mushroom that resembles Toad from Mario Kart, a Simpsons-yellow dude wearing a sideways red baseball cap, the red letters “BU” for school pride. These are the images that Goyal and his team wanted to capture while pointing the camera lens in a completely different direction.
Their work is part of a larger effort to design cameras that can peer around corners, also known as non-line-of-sight cameras. These devices could eventually help self-driving cars avoid collisions, firefighters rescue people from burning buildings, or governments spy on adversaries.