Here’s Hal Hodson, writing for New Scientist:

Davis says that although spying is the obvious application for visual microphones, he is more excited about using them as a new way of measuring the physical properties of objects remotely.

“We look at how light is reflected off an object, and that tells us the colour of that object,” Davis explains. “Now we can see how the object responds to sound. It’s a whole other dimension we could use. How something responds to sound indicates structural material properties that we’re not used to looking at, and our hope is that the project this will find completely new applications.”

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Davis says that while a regular digital camera with a rolling shutter can’t recover speech, it can recover vocal qualities like gender. In many ways, their demonstration illustrates how sound leaves a literal imprint on our environment.

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