Although its Windows Phone platform may stuck in the mud, that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from developing some killer smartphone camera technologies over the last week. Just a few days ago we wrote about the amazing new technology that Microsoft has developed to help you make incredibly steady time-lapse videos while you’re walking around with your smartphone camera or GoPro. And now Technology Review brings us word that Microsoft engineers have figured out a way to modify ordinary smartphone cameras and give them the ability to take 3D images.
How did Microsoft’s team accomplish this impressive feat? Apparently they started by removing a smartphone camera’s infrared filter and replaced it with a filter that only allowed infrared light to get through — in other words, it replaced a part that was designed to one thing with a part that was designed to do precisely the opposite.
Technology Review says that Microsoft did this because it wanted “to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room” so that “the light would bounce off the nearby object and return to the sensor with a corresponding intensity” and thus make it possible to determine exactly how close or far the object was from the lens at the time of the photo.
This is an incredibly cool breakthrough and you should check out Technology Review’s much more detailed explanation by clicking the source link below.
