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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.
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
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?
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.
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.