New Approach to 3D Imagery

Reuters - June 24

THE CAMERA SYSTEM cannot project an image, like a hologram, which uses a laser beam. But it can create an image that can be viewed in three dimensions on a computer and even “walked through” using virtual reality, the researchers said.

David Brady of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues combined two kinds of technology — computed tomography, which is used to scan the inside of the body, and interferometry, which makes it possible to see an image without focusing on it.

“The most immediate applications are in microscopy,” Brady, an electrical engineer, said in a telephone interview.

CT scanning can do this through scanning — meaning an image is recorded line by line. Brady’s system more resembles photography in that it records the entire image at once.

So instead of having to put a cell onto a slide for microscopic examination, researchers could suspend the cell in a droplet, then photograph it in real time and in three dimensions.

For everyday consumers, the camera might offer 3-D television without the need for special glasses. “You would be able to record everything in a room, and a person would be able to walk in and see everything,” Brady said.

Writing in the journal Science, Brady’s team said they based their system on the radio interferometry that astronomers use to look at distant objects in space.

“With interferometric cameras there is no need to focus,” Brady said. “The image is in focus at all depths.”

This can be viewed on a computer screen — something many people already do with images taken by digital cameras.

“People think of an image as something that is recorded on film, but when you go to digital systems there is no reason to think of it that way at all,” Brady said.

Brady’s research was funded in part by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which he said would like to use it for military applications.

A camera that worked without having to focus would be “smarter,” he said. “They have cameras spread throughout the world — a lot more cameras than people,” he said. These include cameras taking pictures from satellites.

“If a missile is flying through the air, for example, it makes it easier to track if you don’t have to focus on it.”

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