When sound waves hit an object, they cause that object to move. Those movements are so tiny that we usually can't see them, let alone understand them as information. But researchers at MIT developed a means to translate those vibrations into sound.
As a demonstration, they pointed a camera through a window at a bag of potato chips. Then, perhaps as a reference to the earliest sound recordings, they played Mary Had a Little Lamb. The camera recorded the movement of the bag. A computer program analyzed that footage and reconstructed a clear performance of the song.
In fact, the reconstructions that the team made were so clear that they were understandable by a song recognition app. It's amazing! And also kind of scary.
-via Twisted Sifter
Newest 5 Comments
That's it -- no more plants in my house. And those empty chip bags --- off the floor and into the trash from now on.
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I can't wait until they try this with old silent films.
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You're both missing the point, MIT has this project going, this will result in publicly available software for this technology, obviously DARPA is far advanced in these areas, that is NOT the point. The point is, in a few years nothing will be secure. Nothing
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This isn't all that new. Gov't and corp. espionage has been doing the laser/window thing Joseph mentions for decades. There are window frames sold that play sound into the window to combat this very thing. As for this chip bag, it is an ideal test situation. CIA devices have long since been "rumored" to far out-do this tech for well over a decade. Infrared and pressure fluctuations are known ways to read sound from rooms from rather long distances.
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That's pretty cool. I think they've been able to bounce a laser off a window and hear the interior sounds.
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