Laser backpack makes lab product news headlines

The latest lab product news from the University of California, Berkeley, could sound like something out of a Hollywood movie.

Scientists at the academic institution have devised a laser backpack, designed to be used by humans - and not by robots.

The backpack is capable of mapping the interior of a structure while its wearer is walking along, without needing to be stationary at the instant that a reading is taken.

As a result, it could be an important development in lab product news for some organisations, as its developers claim stop-and-go solutions already available take much longer to acquire the same data.

The UC Berkeley team call the system "a breakthrough technology, capable of producing fast, automatic and realistic 3D mapping of difficult interior environments".

Professor Avideh Zakhor, who worked on the development of the backpack, gained his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, with a thesis entitled Reconstruction of Multidimensional Signals from Multiple Level Threshold Crossings.