3D room-mapping is now a snap!

Imagine walking into a room, snapping your fingers, and instantly knowing the exact size and shape of that room, in all three dimensions, accurate down to a few millimetres.

This is the latest development from a team of American and Swiss researchers, who have developed a computer program that only needs four microphones and a snap of the fingers in order to return the size and shape of a room.

"Our software can build a 3D map of a simple, convex room with a precision of a few millimeters," PhD student Ivan Dokmanić said in a statement.

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"Each microphone picks up the direct sound from the source, as well as the echoes arriving from various walls," he added. "The algorithm then compares the signal from each microphone. The infinitesimal lags that appear in the signals are used to calculate not only the distance between the microphones, but also the distance from each microphone to the walls and the sound source."

The program doesn't return an actual picture of the room, of course, but just the dimensions and angles themselves, which can then be reconstructed into a 3-dimensional image by anyone with access to the data. It's not perfect, though. The room shape and dimensions understandably have to be fairly simple, and the room needs to be quiet, otherwise the program likely won't return anything useful, but this is a great start.

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If this sounds familiar, it's possible that's because Batman came up with something similar in The Dark Knight using cellphone signals. It's not exactly the same, of course, since, obviously Bruce Wayne's project was fiction and this is real, but the principle is the same, and it can be used for many applications, including architecture, engineering and forensic science, as well as military and security.

"There are already many applications, and we foresee many more," said Dokmanić in the statement. "This is only the beginning!"

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