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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?
played back at 24fps, it would take over 1,000 years to watch 1 second of video captured at 1,000,000,000,000fps.
I love the whooshing sound deadlines make as they fly by, maybe this will slow them down enough to see what they look like too!
What would you like to see slowed down to such a degree?
Hint: It involves a trampoline, or maybe a wet tshirt...
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Streak cameras have been around for decades. They take a one dimensional source of light, and sweep it across a 2D detector very quickly so that the second dimension gives you the time resolution much shorter than the exposure time used by the sensor. Streak cameras with time resolution in picoseconds is pretty common, and many have sub-picosecond resolution. The problem is that once the a light source is swept across the camera, you are limited by the time it takes to read and reset the sensor before you can repeat the process, giving you the same repetition rate as high speed 2D cameras. So you might have 100 fs time resolution, but it would be one dimensional, and only last for 100 ps, before having to wait a few microseconds to milliseconds to take another image (there are some tricks to get two images given one sensor before reading it, and some high end cameras will just have multiple sensors in parallel to get faster successive images).
The novelty here seems not to be the camera, but the use of a laser for illumination and the stitching of many 1D images taken over an hour or so together into one 2D image.
Well they can, just not individual photons or individual photon events.
It's exactly the same as an oscilloscope -- you also don't see the shape of an individual pulse. You under-sample, and then add the samples together assuming it was always the same pulse.
Only with digital scopes. With analog that's exactly how it works, you can, if you want, see literally one pulse. Not much analog scopes on professional desktops anymore... they're all on hardware hackers basement desks now, like mine. Thats why I bring it up, on average across /. readership there are probably more analog scope users than digital scope users. That would make an interesting /. poll,
1) I use an analog scope
2) I use a digital scope
3) Cowboy Neal is a my scope
4) Whats an oscilloscope?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Tim Samaras is a storm researcher who has captured lightning strikes at 10,000 frames per second:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyUsjsJ-E0c
It's not 1,000,000,000,000 FPS, but it's still pretty cool.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
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.
Morbo: Photons do not work that way! Good night!
Seriously. You can't detect a photon unless it actually collides with the detector. So how do you detect movement of photons across a scene?
If you have a rare and expensive quad channel scope, watch the TX and RX, AND the hardware control lines and have fun telling them how fast their interrupt service routines are, this used to completely freak out OS/device driver developers (so... you mean you just look on a scope, instead of hand counting theoretical instructions?)
I will admit you are correct, if you have way too much money you can buy direct non undersampling digital scopes. Or I suppose if you're only monitoring audio speed signals or whatever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Times, at 30 fps, to watch
- a lightning strike move 1 meter : ~ 1 week
- one bullet streak by Neo's head : ~ 100 days
- one boob bounce on Baywatch : ~ 1 century
Better bring lots of popcorn.
Yes, since it's "Active" illumination, you just detect from which direction the flash of light is coming from - though you need a very wideband detector since it could be anywhere on the spectrum and will almost certainly be infrared above 1000nm...
Then once you see the person aiming their "LIDAR" at you, you swivel the tank's gun and send some high-velocity non-photonic matter their way... Probably the most effective countermeasure.
Most of this technology uses very long wavelength ( around 1500nm ) light so that it's not going to be obvious what you're doing. It also tends to work over very long distances, eg, 10Km away... :) It's more used for detection and identification of enemy equipment at long range under conditions of darkness.
Even then I don't think it's all that common. Thermal is more practical for detection now and I imagine Lidar is special use only ( eg, when very high resolution images are required, when topological information is important or for underwater use ) -
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I have never seen a new technology appear that was not met with that reaction on slashdot. I think people have some serious misconceptions about what science looks like when you follow it on a daily or weekly basis. Step functions exist only in theory.
What you are seeing is probably a sphere of expanding plasma. It can't possibly be a "sphere of light" because light travels at the speed of light. By the time you could see the sphere, you would be inside it.
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