What Does a Camera Look Like, If You Sand It Down Layer by Layer?

That’s what a camera looks like, layer by layer. GIF: WIRED Design/Video: Laurin Döpfner

Everyone at some point has wished they had x-ray vision. What could
be cooler than seeing through walls and looking inside stuff? How about
looking inside stuff gradually, layer by layer?

That weird superpower is just what we get in this video by Laurin Döpfner, dug up by the good folk at Colossal.
Döpfner used an industrial sander to blast away at chunks of wood,
cameras, nuts and more, taking snapshots every step of the way–about a
hundred slices for each object. Then, he stringed the photographs
together as a stop motion clip.

The results are mesmerizing, like watching all these commonplace
things erode on fast forward and then reconstitute themselves in half
that time. And it actually makes you think that x-ray vision might not
be so great after all. You think it’s all scopin’ people naked, but what
you really get is a bunch of person meat and a cross section view of a
pancreas.