If you can’t have X-ray specs, then a phone that can see through walls might just be the next best thing. Thanks to some researchers out of the University of Texas it’s now totally possible. They’ve taken the tech that powers the privacy-invading airport security terahertz wave scanners and made it tiny to create a phone-sized chip that’ll give your next smartphone the ability to see through walls.

The chip shrinks down the power requirements too, although you can bet your first born-child that this thing will still suck down juice like nobody’s business. They’ve built it using CMOS chips too, which camera aficionados should already be well acquainted with.

Right now the terahertz camera chip is designed to work within 4-inches due to “privacy concerns” – the Texas researchers no all too well that the first thing you’d do if you got your mitts on this thing would be to point it at the first pretty girl who walked past. Still, there are a plethora of possible applications for this kind of thing, no less so in medicine. You could use a portable terahertz scanner to peer inside your body to look for cancer for instance.

Some how I doubt we’ll see this kind of thing in the iPhone 6 let alone the iPhone 5, but we might see it by the time the Galaxy S VI rolls around. How about bolting this thing into some Google Goggles – then we really would get some awesome X-ray specs from the future with augmented reality over the top for good measure too. [University of Texas via Science Daily]

Image credit: X-ray from Shutterstock