James Bond's latest spy gadget is a bag of potato chips

We're pretty sure this is one technology Q would've loved to have invented himself.

Researchers at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft and Adobe have figured out a way to make your favorite snack turn on you, with just a video camera.

'When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate. The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that's usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn't realize that this information was there,' an MIT release quoted Abe Davis, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper, as saying.

The new algorithm in effect can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing the seemingly invisible vibrations captured in the video.

Long-distance eavesdropping

Using this method, researchers managed to reconstruct speech from the vibrations of a bag of potato chips-even if the bag was filmed from 15 feet away and through soundproof glass.

'This is new and refreshing. It's the kind of stuff that no other group would do right now,' added Alexei Efros, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Efros compared the technique as 'totally out of some Hollywood thriller.'

'You know that the killer has admitted his guilt because there's surveillance footage of his potato chip bag vibrating,' he said.

Similarly, the researchers recovered sounds from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant, the MIT said.

The researchers are to present their findings at this year's Siggraph, the premier computer graphics conference.

Aside from forensics and law enforcement, the new technique opens possibilities for what Davis described as a 'new kind of imaging.'

The researchers are now trying to determine the material and structural properties of objects from their response to short bursts of sound, MIT said.

Davis said the sound can also give much information about the object itself, 'because different objects are going to respond to sound in different ways.'

'I'm sure there will be applications that nobody will expect. I think the hallmark of good science is when you do something just because it's cool and then somebody turns around and uses it for something you never imagined. It's really nice to have this type of creative stuff,' Efros added.

But the trick is not for just anyone - the researchers needed a high-speed camera that captured 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second, some 100 times faster than some smartphones.

However, the high-speed camera is also below the frame rates of high-end commercial high-speed cameras, which can top 100,000 frames per second.

On the other hand, using an ordinary digital camera allowed researchers to infer information even if the video had a standard 60 fps.

'While this audio reconstruction wasn't as faithful as it was with the high-speed camera, it may still be good enough to identify the gender of a speaker in a room; the number of speakers; and even, given accurate enough information about the acoustic properties of speakers' voices, their identities,' MIT said. - Joel Locsin/TJD, GMA News