Are we one step closer to having high-quality 3D cameras being built into our smartphones?

It's certainly possible. That's because MIT researchers are saying they've found that exploiting the polarization of light can improve the resolution of 3D imaging devices by as much as 1,000 times.

With the polarization of light being behind most 3D movie systems, this revelation could pave the way for smartphones being equipped with 3D cameras and, taking that even further, a day when users shoot an object with their mobile device in 3D and then use a 3D printer to produce an authentic replica.

"Today, they can miniaturize 3-D cameras to fit on cellphones," Achuta Kadambi, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and one of the 3D system's developers, said in the school's announcement of its findings. "But they make compromises to the 3-D sensing, leading to very coarse recovery of geometry. That's a natural application for polarization, because you can still use a low-quality sensor, and adding a polarizing filter gives you something that's better than many machine-shop laser scanners."

MIT researchers have labeled the new system Polarized 3D and will be presenting it at the International Conference on Computer Vision this month.

To test their polarized theory's depth sensing, MIT researchers used a Microsoft Kinect with a regular polarizing photographic lens in front of its camera. The researchers snapped three photos of an object, rotating the polarizing filter each time, resulting in higher resolution. The Kinect gauges depth using reflection time.

Researchers even believe that their Polarized 3D system can be used to help the development of autonomous driving technology, especially under harsh weather conditions such as the rain, snow and fog. In those conditions, water particles in the air scatter light in unpredictable ways, making it much harder to interpret, and the 3D polarization would sharpen the images.

Let's see how soon this research can be implemented.