Goodrich ISR sensor equipment has been able to do this for a while regardless of the type of plastic for the purpose of quality control in product containers:
http://www.sensorsinc.com/image_powderswirenlarge.html ... "While a visible camera cannot see through plastics, these same plastics are transparent with the short wave infrared. Goodrich ISR-P cameras can see through plastic to detect the fill level of a product. This capability is extremely helpful in quality control and process control applications."
"If there is a NAND, people will build computers. I've seen that effect with Minecraft. But using unix pipes is just awesome, too :D" (first comment from post)
Hetzner is comparable to Heroku and AWS, except that you have to do your own rack buildouts, private IP subnets, load balancing, redundancy zones, and CDN.