Portable, Super-high-resolution 3-D Imaging

An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights. This technology could have applications to industrial inspection, dermatology, and even forensic ballistics."

Neat and not anticipated

[JoshuaZ]

According to TFA even older, cruder versions of this equipment can "detect the raised ink patterns on a $20 bill." TFA also notes that the way this works is to make the optical properties of the surface of the object essentially uniform. To some extent this is an extension of existing technologies. There are a fair number of imaging techniques that involve doping the surface of something before trying to image it. For example, when one is using an electron microscope one frequently dopes the target with some helpful metal first. But this is a lot easier to run than that and works on the optical range. And the cameras used themselves seem to be not that expensive. This seems a like a really potentially very groundbreaking technology. And it is a good example of how sometimes the technologies that show up and change things aren't technologies that any futurist or science-fiction writer has anticipated. I'll be very interested to see where this technology goes in ten years.

Why so quiet?

[djlemma]

This is so damn cool I don't know why there aren't more comments. I guess it's because there's no real controversy here- it's just cool tech. Quick, somebody claim that this is going to create an invasion of privacy! Or that it will cause climate change!