This Incredible Camera Ignores Perspective and Sees Behind Walls

Engineer, builder and YouTube creator Shane Wighton, famous for his YouTube channel stuff made herehas solved many fascinating engineering problems over the years. The latest is one of the craziest yet. Can the camera see around objects?

“If cameras are so good at seeing things, why can’t they see what’s around them?” Whiten asked. “You’d think there’s no way the cameras could see me back here,” Whiten said, hiding behind a cardboard wall, “but that’s not the case.”

“Theoretically, with the right camera, you should be able to see what’s behind the wall,” he continues, setting the stage for an incredible photographic journey.

Whiten built this so-called “impossible” camera, one of the strangest cameras ever created. It can only see one pixel at a time but create a complete image. It can also perform “like any lens,” including those that are “virtually impossible” to make using real glass.

Wyton’s oddball camera follows the same general principles as the pinhole camera. While they are often thought of as boxes with small holes that let light pass through, the idea can be applied to a variety of shapes and objects. For example, Whiten talks about a pipe. If a light-sensitive material is at one end of a tube, such as an image sensor or film, and the tube moves through space, it can capture the scene as if it were seen through different lenses. The more space you cover, the wider the lens.

As mentioned before, this new camera can only see one pixel at a time, creating a larger image by capturing many different views of a scene. To achieve this, the camera must move in three dimensions. Wighton created a revolving gantry that the camera could move along the arm. In addition, by precisely controlling the angle of the mirror that reflects light onto the image sensor, he can control where the camera is pointed.

Another important component is the encoder. This always records the precise rotational movement and position of the photodetector, ensuring Wighton can reconstruct the final image from all single pixels.

The entire video provides more details and incredible information about how digital cameras in general work, but to cut to the chase, creating this specialized camera was very challenging. After weeks of work and nearly 150 attempts, the rotating single-pixel camera did it — it created an image that looked right.

“Yes! Finally! Wheaton celebrates. “We took a real picture of the wall! Who needs medicine when you have engineering? I didn’t know you’d be so excited about a picture of the wall. That’s great!

With the camera functioning as expected, it’s time to take “more interesting photos.”

Whiten said he enjoys taking some traditional photos, but he built the camera to take “unusual photos,” such as ones that eliminate perspective. With a typical lens, at this point, the human eye’s vision works in a cone. camera no need But, do it this way.

Since Wighton’s camera could not only move along the axis of rotation, but also tilt, it could display an orthographic projection. It relies on parallel projection to display three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional space. Basically, this allows the camera to display objects at their actual size, regardless of their relative position to the camera. In Wyton’s first example, two mannequin heads at different distances appeared to be the same size in the image. It seems really confusing.

The camera also has another way of seeing: reverse perspective. Gigapixel Have seen this type of shot before. Last year, photographer Christopher Getschmann built a hypercentric camera This relies on reverse perspective for hilarious results.

“I don’t know why it’s so satisfying, but you have this weird theoretical thing and seeing it actually come out in the image is the best thing ever,” Whiten said.

After all these interesting experiments, it was time for Wyton’s camera to fulfill its main purpose, observing what’s going on around objects.

More great videos like this can be found at Stuff Made Here YouTube Channel.

Image source: Screenshot from the Stuff Made Here video, “What if we made a camera that looked backwards?”