This seems like the obvious, logical extension of the laser microphones that use stationary objects (like windows) to recover sound in real time...a long known about spy tool.

Really? It doesn't seem that obvious to me at all.

In one case you're shining a light (laser, actually) and measuring the variations in the surface that light is contacting.

In this case you can simply watch a video and hear what was going on in the room when the video was recorded.

Seems much different and much more powerful to extract audio from nothing more than an existing video rather than capturing audio first-person in real-time with specialized equipment.

Really cool stuff. *promote

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Both of them measure the vibration in stationary objects due to noise. The laser measures it by distance, the video measures the vibration by sight. That's why the laser version works so much cleaner, the vibrations it measures are tiny compared to what can be 'seen' on a video, especially since video is (usually) only 60fps, but the laser may sample thousands of times per second. It's still neat, it just seems to be another version of a method that's been around a while, measuring the vibrations of objects to capture audio.

I recall reading something about recovering audio from micro-striations in the grooves on pottery created with a wheel. I don't remember now if it was a serious endeavor or speculative fiction.

There's a funny sci-fi short story about it called "Time Shards" by Gregory Benford... and Mythbusters have done it, and there have been a few serious papers/articles on the subject.

*nochannel, *engineering, *science, *wtf
Wow indeed!

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I know in some very high security buildings. If you get close to a window. you can hear music or sound playing through the glass to stop eavesdropping. I wonder if you could use this technique to circumvent that. If so. Oh shit....