MIT's New Camera Can Take 1 Trillion Frames Per Second

First time accepted submitter probain writes "MIT has made a camera that can take trillion frames per second! With this high speed capability, they can actually see the movement of photons of light across a scene or object. This is just mind-boggling." ExtremeTech has a nice video of the system, too. What would you like to see slowed down to such a degree?

Comments

Slashdot Story Misses the More Exciting Point

[MyLongNickName]

This grew out of a system to see around corners. The professor wanted to build a camera that could analyze the path of reflected light to get pictures around ninety degree angles. This is a really amazing concept, moreso than simply getting a camera to take ever increasingly fast pictures.

if you are interested in learning more and have a lecture's worth of time on your hand, please check one out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKu20y1f_RU

Re:What

[GrpA]

No... The OP is correct.

This isn't new technology. It's called "Gated Image Intensifier Photography" and is used for everything from Lidar to special night vision devices that can see underwater. It is one of the few technologies that allows detection of stealth submarines by taking images of the submarine without the backscatter caused by water in front of it. It's one of the only technologies that can track supercavitating weapons underwater. It can also help see through many obscurants.

It's like a flashlight, except you only look at light reflected at a particular time after the flash ( usually a laser ) goes off. As a result, you can choose to see light that is only reflected from, say, 100m away to 101m away. Everything else looks dark and because of this, it's a good technology for seeing through trees and the likes.

If you want to understand gating of image tubes and streak tubes in particular ( what they use - an electronically steerable image intensifier that can track very high speed objects such as bullets being fired from a gun ) just look up Image Tubes by Illes P Csorba. A great book.

What they are doing here is just gating the image a little faster and repeating it often to capture very short duration repetative events in high detail. Not a new technology, just a variation on existing tech.

And you'll find many modern Gen3 NV devices are autogated, meaning they do this automatically, though it's more a way to pulse-width modulate the light coming in so that they can work under brighter conditions, such as when soldiers burst into a room and the enemy turns on the lights inside...

GrpA

Re:i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[GrpA]

They are talking about shutter rates, not image capture rates... Big difference.

It probably has quite a slow frame rate.

GrpA

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[swalve]

It sounds like they aren't actually capturing 1T fps in real time. They are simulating it by capturing identical scenes at very slightly different intervals. Sort of a wagon wheel effect, or that effect that made the rounds a couple of months ago where they "captured" the movement of guitar strings. Take a machine gun that fires bullets once per second. Take a camera that takes photographs every 1.000000001 seconds. Fire a trillion bullets and take a trillion photographs. Each photograph will show a different bullet, one trillionth of a second further along the path. If you play them back, it looks like a single bullet going really slow.