Throughout his administration, Mecham expressed concern about
possible eavesdropping on his private communications. A senior
member of Mecham's staff broke his leg after falling through a
false ceiling he had been crawling over, looking for covert
listening devices. A private investigator was hired to sweep
the governor's offices looking for bugs. The Governor was quoted
as saying, "Whenever I'm in my house or my office, I always have
a radio on. It keeps the lasers out." After this was reported,
a political cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist
Steve Benson appeared in the Arizona Republic depicting the
governor leaving his house outfitted for laser tag. When asked
about this by reporters, Attorney General Bob Corbin replied in
amusement, "We don't have any ray gun pointed at him."
i.e. there are certainly listening devices that operate based on bouncing a laser off of a window[1] (or some other object), but his use of a quasi-magical protective measure (radios allegedly protecting against lasers) - in addition to the other behaviour mentioned - strongly implies that he was in need of psychiatric care, as opposed to being under surveillance.
FWIW, I've met multiple people with paranoid psychoses of one sort or another, and all of them have incorporated elements of real-world technology into their delusions.
[1] e.g. http://www.lucidscience.com/pro-laser%20spy%20device-1.aspx
http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/2ba3d3962352679dc5b6027b21e4...
Rose is Evan's successor.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/
And previous discussion:
I hope it was the journalist who thought the soda can was surprisingly mediocre and not the researchers. The soda can is immensely stiff compared to the foil and much heavier so it will not move so much, meaning that there is simply less for the camera to see.
I think you could hear that produced sound with a traditional microphone, but you would probably call it the echo of the original sound, and it might be hard to hear it over the original, typically much louder, sound.
An aeroplane flies through the air and a submarine travels through the ocean. I can throw a rock into the air or into the ocean, that doesn't make a rock an aeroplane or a submarine.
Specialist cameras hit 4k fps at second gear, and can go as high as million fps (and even trillion fps [2])!
Besides, this is about reproducing music frequencies, whereas the most probable target for this technology is eavesdropping, not as a replacement for Neumann U87 -- and for that you need way less range.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/2/7/14532610/so...
[2] https://newatlas.com/fastest-camera-44-trillion-frames-per-s...
I wonder how long it'll be until this technique becomes feasible for recording professionally? Like, instead of capsules and diaphragms, we just have a laser that gets the cleanest, clearest possible signal it can, from the room around you ..
"Worse is better" sometimes applies to mics as well. For example, new podcasters are often advised to use cheap dynamic mics since it forces them to get close to the mic (improving their signal-to-noise ratio) and doesn't pick up audio over 15 kHz (which is not meaningful for voice recording).
They show audio captured from a 60fps video from a DSLR exploiting the rolling shutter. I'm not sure if you can use less than 60fps though?
It would be interesting to compare the two methods in various scenarios, i.e. through glass.
Obviously the laser method will work at night while the video method will not (probably depends how "dark" it is).
By keeping a fixed object in view of the camera (e.g. a reflector on the stage), a camera could correct for its own vibrations and achieve perfect rejection of outside noise, unlike most microphones which have a cardioid pattern.
Probably a pipe dream, but cool idea.
