Seeing what’s happening on the other side of a corner isn’t as impossible as it sounds. Scientists have been working on the problem for years, using lasers to bounce light off unseen objects and detect what’s going beyond their line of sight. Now, researchers from MIT’s CSAIL have gone one step further: they’re using footage from an ordinary smartphone to “see” around corners by spotting subtle changes in light and shadow.
The premise of the work is simple: all objects reflect light, and, by closely studying the floor near a corner, you can see if something is moving on the other side based on changing shadows.
These fluctuations are invisible to the human eye, but researchers were able to spot them by tweaking the footage from ordinary commercial cameras, and even an iPhone 5s. Read More
