This unprepossessing lump of hardware is a Millimeter Wave TV Camera which can capture images of things behind obstacles like plywood walls and suchlike. The tech, based around radio wave sensitivity, is still very new, and the quality of the resulting images are not amazing, but it looks like something that could be very useful in the future for finding people in smoke filled buildings and other emergency scenarios.
“With conventional optical cameras, it’s not possible to take pictures through an obstruction such as plywood. But by using millimeter waves instead of light, it is possible, because millimeter waves pass through plywood. In this demo, we actually have a piece of plywood as an obstruction, and we’re filming the motion of a mannequin on the other side.”