The erratic behaviour of photons zooming around and bouncing off objects and walls inside a room inspired researchers to combine them with advanced optics to enable them "see" what's hidden around the corners or even behind the walls.

This technique, developed by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard, Wisconsin and Rice Universities, may prove invaluable in disaster recovery situations, as well as in non-invasive biomedical imaging applications.

"Say you have a house collapsing and need to know if anyone is inside, our technology would be useful," says Otkrist Gupta, MIT graduate student who led the study, the journal Optics Express reports.