While the smartphone of today has become a pretty amazing sensor for discovering the real world, the smartphone of tomorrow may just give you the ability to have X-ray vision. That’s the potential implication of a breakthrough at the University of Texas, Dallas, where researchers say they have taken a big step closer to enabling a phone to see a short distance through wood, walls, plastics and other objects.

It comes down to the ability to bridge what’s called the terahertz gap in the infrared band. The terahertz band is largely unused because the band is too high for electronics and too low for light-based systems. But an engineering team at the University of Texas at Dallas has found a way to create images with signals in the terahertz band without having to use multiple lenses inside a device. Basically, they’re able to focus light without using a lot of big lenses and…