Professional photographers carrying bulky lenses to capture shots from a distance are a common sight, and even the amateur photographers among us have struggled to focus on the minute details of a small object, even at a close distance. But a new method of photography could both do away with the need of telephoto lenses as well as allow capturing microscopic details from a distance.

Called “Synthetic Apertures for long-range, subdiffraction-limited Visible Imaging” or SAVI for short, the system’s prototype was built and tested by researchers from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It extends a well-known technique already used in radio imaging to visual imaging, and the tests showed the system improved the resolution of sundry diffuse objects by as much as six times.

SAVI works by first illuminating a spot with a laser and then capturing the resulting speckle pattern — diffuse reflections caused by the coming together of different phases and amplitudes of monochromatic light such as lasers — with a camera sensor. Different camera positions are used — something like the technique to create the “bullet time” in the “Matrix” films — and the raw data is fed into a computer which constructs a high-resolution composite image.