Enlarge / With the right type of processing, frosted glass can actually improve imaging. (credit: Steve K / Flickr)
It’s probably not often that someone walks into your office and says, “I want you to make me a finely engineered device that makes everything worse.” Yet that seems to be a solution to creating images of large areas that still retain lots of detail.
Normally, imaging systems are a product of extremely careful engineering. I’ve heard engineers talk about polishing lenses to an accuracy of a picometer (10-12m) because that’s what you need to do to reach some image requirements. In general, the more careful you are, the better the image. But recent developments have been going the other way. It turns out that we can make use of the randomness created by rough surfaces to obtain high-quality images.
Grind that glass
So imagine a sheet of glass: you shine laser light in, and laser light comes out. It’s the most boring show on Earth. The next step is to roughen one face of the glass. After a bit of grinding (wear a mask), you have something like the translucent glass in your bathroom window. When you shine a laser light through that, what emerges is a mess of speckles and blur. We have successfully destroyed a laser beam.
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