Trillion-Frames-Per-Second Video: The Slowest Fastest Camera
By Rob Scott
December 14, 2011
December 14, 2011
- Researchers at MIT have developed a new imaging system that can record one trillion exposures per second. “That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom,” reports MIT News.
- Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers at the MIT Media Lab, describes it as the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he explains.
- “The system relies on a recent technology called a streak camera, deployed in a totally unexpected way,” explains the article. “The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light — photons — enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.”
- However, to produce the super-slow-motion videos, the crew needs to perform the same experiment repeatedly: “It takes only a nanosecond — a billionth of a second — for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes about an hour to collect all the data necessary for the final video.” Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar calls the system “the world’s slowest fastest camera.”
- “Although impractical for non-repeatable situations like filming live action, this research could lead to better, cheaper lighting,” points out ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld.
- Be sure not to miss the 3-minute MIT Media Lab video.
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