Any wall can be turned into a camera to see around corners

An ordinary camera could soon take photos of things that are out of sight, thanks to algorithms that interpret how light bounces off a wall.

“Normally, when light bounces off rough surfaces, like walls, it scrambles the scene into a messy blur,” says Wenwen Li at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei. “Our goal was to ‘unscramble’ that blur and recover the hidden scene. Think of it like turning a rough wall into a mirror.”