The future is here, and it’s as cool and creepy as you might have expected.
X-ray vision has always been well below my list of superpowers I would love to possess, far behind time travel and mind reading. But X-ray vision might be closer to reality than the other options, and I’ll take whatever I can get. Researchers at the University of Glasgow are working to combine artificial intelligence and human brain waves to identify objects in the corner, objects that humans normally cannot see because it is just around the corner. It is called the “ghost imaging” system and will be presented at this month’s Congress of Imaging and Applied Optics.
“We believe this work provides ideas that could one day be used to bring together human and artificial intelligence,” Daniele Faccio, a professor of quantum technology at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, told Optica. “The next steps in this work range from expanding the ability to provide in-depth 3D information to looking for ways to combine multiple information from multiple viewers at once.”
Research is part of the image without a line of sight, according to New Atlas, which is a branch of technology that allows people to see obscured objects. Sometimes it requires a laser light to be sent over a surface, which seems very similar to the power Superman could have.
But Faccio’s experiment worked like this: an object was projected onto a piece of cardboard. A person, who wears an electroencephalography headset to monitor their brain waves, can only see diffuse light on a wall instead of the actual light patterns being projected. The EEG helmet reads signals to the person’s visual cortex, which are fed to a computer, which then works to identify the object by AI the person’s brain waves. And it was successful: in about a minute, researchers were able to successfully reconstruct 16 x 16-pixel images of simple objects that people could not see through the obstacle.
“This is one of the first times that computational imaging has been performed using the human visual system in a neurofeedback loop that adjusts the imaging process in real time,” Faccio said. “While we could have used a standard detector instead of the human brain to detect fuzzy signals from the wall, we wanted to explore methods that could one day be used to increase human capabilities.”