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A camera that can shoot around corners has been developed by US scientists.
The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene.
The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believe it has uses in search and rescue and robot vision.
"It's like having x-ray vision without the x-rays," said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system.
"But we're going around the problem rather than going through it."
Professor Shree Nayar of Columbia University, an expert in light scattering and computer vision, was very complimentary about the work and said it was a new and "very interesting research direction".
"What is not entirely clear is what complexities of invisible scenes are computable at this point," he told BBC News.
"They have not yet shown recovery of an entire [real-world] scene, for instance."
Flash trick Professor Raskar said that when he started research on the camera three years ago, senior people told him it was "impossible".
However, working with several students, the idea is becoming a reality.
The heart of the room-sized camera is a femtosecond laser, a high-intensity light source which can fire ultra-short bursts of laser light that last just one quadrillionth of a second (that's 0.000000000000001 seconds).
The light sources are more commonly used by chemists to image reactions at the atomic or molecular scale.
For the femtosecond transient imaging system, as the camera is known, the laser is used to fire a pulse of light onto a scene.
The light particles scatter and reflect off all surfaces including the walls and the floor.
A camera that can shoot around corners has been developed by US scientists.
The prototype uses an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate a scene.
The device constructs a basic image of its surroundings - including objects hidden around the corner - by collecting the tiny amounts of light that bounce around the scene.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team believe it has uses in search and rescue and robot vision.
"It's like having x-ray vision without the x-rays," said Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system.
"But we're going around the problem rather than going through it."
Professor Shree Nayar of Columbia University, an expert in light scattering and computer vision, was very complimentary about the work and said it was a new and "very interesting research direction".
"What is not entirely clear is what complexities of invisible scenes are computable at this point," he told BBC News.
"They have not yet shown recovery of an entire [real-world] scene, for instance."
Flash trick Professor Raskar said that when he started research on the camera three years ago, senior people told him it was "impossible".
However, working with several students, the idea is becoming a reality.
The heart of the room-sized camera is a femtosecond laser, a high-intensity light source which can fire ultra-short bursts of laser light that last just one quadrillionth of a second (that's 0.000000000000001 seconds).
The light sources are more commonly used by chemists to image reactions at the atomic or molecular scale.
For the femtosecond transient imaging system, as the camera is known, the laser is used to fire a pulse of light onto a scene.
The light particles scatter and reflect off all surfaces including the walls and the floor.
