3-D cameras for cellphones
When Microsoft’s Kinect — a device that lets Xbox users control games with physical gestures — hit the market, computer scientists immediately began hacking it. A black plastic bar about 11 inches wide with an infrared rangefinder and a camera built in, the Kinect produces a visual map of the scene before it, with information about the distance to individual objects. At MIT alone, researchers have used the Kinect to create a “Minority Report”-style computer interface, a navigation system for miniature robotic helicopters and a holographic-video transmitter, among other things.Now imagine a device that provides more-accurate depth information than the Kinect, has a greater range and works under all lighting conditions — but is so small, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into a cellphone at very little extra cost. That’s the promise of recent work by Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of...