The world of 3D has made quite a fair number of leaps and bounds in the past few years, where we now even have 3D movies that are being shown regularly, 3D printers for the home so that you can come up with some of your zanier creations, and here we are with word of an experimental 3D scanner that hails from MIT researchers which is touted to be able to create clear images of poorly lit objects with the clever use of single photons . Of course, all of it will be in 3D, no doubt about it.
This new technique will not rely on any kind of hardware that would not look out of place in the 22nd century, but rather, the MIT team had been working using a standard photon detector which will fire low-intensity visible laser light pulses at the targeted subjects. When that happens, specially developed algorithms would be able to detect any kind of variations in the time which it requires for individual photons to echo, or ping back. Once the software has done the hard work of separating noise as seen above, you would end up with a high resolution image which has been created using approximately a million photons.
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