This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Ramesh Raskar wants to make the invisible visible. "My work often starts with a goal that to others appears impossible," says Raskar, who heads the Camera Culture group at the Media Lab. "Then it becomes merely improbable; then, finally, inevitable." One of his "impossible" ideas is Looking Around Corners, in which users can sense objects not in their line of sight with a device that uses short laser pulses and a fast detector. "Growing up, I was always interested in vision," the 42-year-old says. "I used to have this strange feeling that what I would see in front of me wouldn't be there any more when I turned around."
Born in Maharashtra, India, Raskar showed potential from an early age -- he finished top out of 500,000 students in his university entry exams. In 2000 he joined Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he developed a multiflash camera. "I had about 40 patents, I was getting calls every week but was getting too comfortable," says Raskar. So he moved to MIT and started a new field: computational light transport. "It's about how light goes from one place to another," he says. "We create a movement of photons, study the image and use computers to invert the process and learn about the original scene."
Raskar and his team are developing projects such as retinal imaging glasses (below), glass-free 3D displays and Netra, a low-cost medical device that you can attach to smartphones to get spectacle prescriptions and cataract tests. "I believe that the fun is at the intersection of design, computation and optics,", he says. "We can build devices that cost a billion dollars and are used by one person, and devices that cost one dollar and can help a billion people."
Ramesh Raskar also spoke at Wired 2012. You can find our report on his talk here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
