How did they do this?

Hint: They used a very clever process to achieve this.  At first glance or notion, one might think of something like a periscope that peeks around the corner.  That could potentially work in a literal sense but it wouldn’t be very effective.  Here is a bit more background on how these very clever researchers used a new technique to achieve this:

A group of scientists led by Genevieve Gariepy have developed a state-of-the-art detector which, with some clever data processing techniques, can turn walls and floors into a ‘virtual mirror’, giving the power to locate and track moving objects out of direct line of sight.

The shiny surface of a mirror works by reflecting scattered light from an object at a well-defined angle towards your eye. Because light scattered from different points on the object is reflected at the same angle, your eye sees a clear image of the object. In contrast, a non-reflective surface scatters light randomly in all directions, and creates no clear image.

Get ready to have your mind blown with this technology:

However, as the researchers at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh recognised, there is a way to tease out information on the object even from apparently random scattered light. Their method, published in Nature Photonics, relies on laser range-finding technology, which measures the distance to an object based on the time it takes a pulse of light to travel to the object, scatter, and travel back to a detector.

We hope you like the video.  What types of applications do you think they would use this for?

thanks to sciencealert.com for the great info

thanks to The Conversation for the great info