How would you like a camera that can take pictures around corners? You may not have long to waitresearchers have devised a way to photographically capture the rough shape of objects out of a camera's line-of-sight by "untangling" bursts of light that's reflected off surfaces the camera can see.

Scientists at MIT, Harvard, and Rice University built upon techniques developed at the MIT Media Lab involving the use of femtosecond laser bursts lasting just a few quadrillionths of a second and a detector built to measure them upon their return after bouncing off walls and objects. Publishing this week in Nature Communications, the research team describes a technique for capturing unseen visual information that is similar to the way a periscope works, minus the need for an apparatus to poke around a corner and using far-less-than-optimal reflective surfaces instead of highly polished, carefully angled mirrors.

In other words, it's a vastly more complicated bit of optics than you'll find on a submarine, requiring highly advanced, ultra high-speed camera technology and complex computational algorithms.

The way it works is by shooting several rounds of femtosecond laser bursts at a wall that faces both the camera and a room hidden around a corner. The laser light bounces around the hidden room and returns back to the detector, which measures the time taken for that light to return and the angle at which it returns. That data is enough to describe the basic geometry of the hidden room and any objects inside it, so long as you've got the right reconstruction algorithms and enough computational horsepower to do it.

And lo and behold, the researchers have managed to demonstrate the principle working in real life (video below). The technology is still at a pretty early stage, however. The team's camera is "able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimeter depth precision and centimeter lateral precision over 40 cm-by-40 cm-by-40 cm of hidden space," which sounds very impressive until you see the fairly distorted reproduction of the hidden, three-dimensional object they set out to capture.

The work does represent a major breakthrough in developing a camera that can see around corners, which research team member Ramesh Raskar of MIT believes could one day be used to assist firefighters and police, built into vehicle navigation systems, and integrated into endoscopic medical devices.