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Do You Know X-ray Vision of OnePlus 8 Pro which can sees through plastic and clothes.
Okay, here's a camera trick that we haven't seen in a smartphone before: X-ray vision. And, at least, anything that sounds a lot like that. It's a feature of the latest OnePlus 8 Pro, which appears to be using infrared sensors on the platform to see through a small subset of black materials.
If you have a OnePlus 8 Pro and want to test it on your own, just open the camera window, move over to the "Photochrom" color filter, and point it to any black objects.
Fair warning: we've tested with the filter ourselves, and it's really very narrow. This just operates on very thin black film, which is still a little noticeable under the right light. Speak of stuff like TV remotes, rather than the harder plastic of a high-end DSLR. It's hit or missed with shoes, too.
We saw this trick for the first time via Ben Geskin on Twitter but a lot of people have demonstrated it since then. There's a nice Unbox Therapy video that shows the filter in motion, staring at an Apple TV box, a remote control, and even a thin black T-Shirt.
Yet how is it going to work? We've reached out to OnePlus to see what they know (and to clarify whether or not it was an deliberate feature), but it seems that the mechanism depends on the infrared sensors of the handset, which absorb a form of radiation invisible to the human eye.
Infrared lies just above visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum, often referred to as "heat radiation," and that's how we experience its effects. The atmosphere is covered with infrared, so we don't normally worry about it because we don't see it. Approximately half of the radiation that comes from the Sun to Earth falls as infrared.
Turns out the TrueDepth camera can also have the “X-ray” effect with some plastics. Here it is showing the insides of an Apple TV 4K. (Thanks @HarckerTech for the idea) pic.twitter.com/R8x8Bu4yPv
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) May 14, 2020
Unique types of equipment can capture infrared radiation, including night vision goggles and thermal cameras.
This helps you to see through other objects, because radiation travels through them in a manner that the visible light (which is visible to all our eyes) can not see. Firefighters, for example, use infrared cameras to see burning structures through smoke.
As high-end phones are now beginning to add infrared sensors, it seems like they can be used for the same purpose. And it's not just the OnePlus 8 Pro that can do that. The TrueDepth camera on modern iPhones, which uses infrared light to check your face for FaceID, can also be exploited to generate visual pictures, as the Guilherme Rambo software maker has proven (though it appears you need a jailbroken iPhone to do this).
The concern that remains is that this would cause difficulty for OnePlus, particularly if the filter can be used to see through clothing with all the privacy concerns that it involves. In the Unbox Therapy footage, it seems that the filter can be seen through clothes, but in very minimal circumstances. The same thing has been confirmed by the Reddit regular.
Depending on the extent of the problem, OnePlus can have to limit the functionality by upgrading the app. After all, there was a similar controversy in the 1990s when Sony was forced to withdraw a camera that had a night vision feature that could even be used to see through clothes.
