The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV
and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of
the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing
and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being
used by kids all over the world to learn programming.
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."
Ramesh Raskar explains how the camera can shoot around corners.
