Wanna See Around Corners? Better Get Yourself a Laser

You can't see the bunny, but the picosecond laser certainly can. In a lab at Stanford, engineers have set up a weird contraption, hiding a toy bunny behind a T-shaped wall. And their complex system of computation and rapidly firing lasers can see around that corner. At least that's the idea behind this technique, which uses the flight paths of the photons in lasers to calculate the shape and position of hidden objects--be they bunnies or passing pedestrians. This system deploys the same very, very precise timing that drives the laser-spewing lidar on a self-driving car.