Cameras used to be their own devices with lenses and film and trips to the drug store to get the pictures developed. Then, they disappeared into phones, tablets, laptops, and video game consoles. Now, it appears that cameras could someday become as inconspicuous as a pane of glass.

According to new research, a photodetector pressed up against the edge of a window can detect the reflections that bounce around inside the glass—like light signals traversing a fiber optic cable. And some clever processing of those tiny trickles of detected light enables the pane of glass to act like a giant camera lens.

The resulting grainy images (think of pixelated, somewhat distorted and lower-resolution cousins to shots taken by first-generation smartphones) won’t compete anytime soon with conventional cameras for picture quality. But for the purposes of many computer vision programs, a window pane or a piece of car windshield may provide all the resolution that an image processing algorithm or neural network might need.