Interesting story, but flagged as blogspam.<p>Could an admin please change the link to a primary source like this one: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213....</a><p>Or even this one:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lin...</a><p>[Edit]<p>gmaslov's comment provides an even better link, although not as 'newsy': <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/" rel="nofollow">http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/</a>
My friend Steve Silverman worked on a system which they commercialized back in 2006 [1] that unlike the MIT one captures full-frames so you can get 3D at video frame rates.<p>It uses a 5ns long pulsed laser "photon torpedos" at 30hz to illuminate the scene and then captures the at a much higher sampling rate where the MIT system just scans a line at a time. So, unlike the MIT one, it's a small, hand-hold-able, system that captures full motion. [2]<p>You get full scene 3D without the drawbacks of scanning.<p>They flew one of their cameras on the last Discovery Mission.<p>[1] <a href="http://asc3D.com" rel="nofollow">http://asc3D.com</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L91F9o600E" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L91F9o600E</a><p><a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3656494784112768834" rel="nofollow">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3656494784112768834</a><p>I had the chance to play with it a couple years ago - quite amazing.
This works by sampling a static scene a very large number of times with a laser flash and a "streak tube" camera that records a picosecond-long movie of the light arriving at a single scanline.<p>A normal video camera records a frame at a time, this one records a scanline-sized movie at a time. The raw data is noisy but the scene is static so they can sample the same line over many flashes.<p>After a few minutes of scanning they have a trillion fps video where you can see a wavefront propagate at the speed of light. Amazing.
The relevant video from MIT Media Lab is here:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtsXgODHMWk</a><p>> MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.<p>> <a href="http://www.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/" rel="nofollow">http://www.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/</a>
Ever since I started playing with PWM control of LEDs for lighting, I've wanted a visualization of the spherical pulses of light traveling through a room (inspired by the moving-mirror cameras used to analyze high-speed explosions). I calculated the PWM frequency I would need to reach before the light arriving from the far walls of a room could be distinguished from the original pulse. Thank-you, MIT, for actually making this happen, on an even cooler scale.<p>I wonder if the in-room impulse response of an LED light source could be exploited for ultra-high-bandwidth data transmission through open air.
The actual website for the project is here <a href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/" rel="nofollow">http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/</a> , and has a great FAQ section and more videos.
I heard the word virtual used to describe the camera, and couldn't figure out if they were, for sure, talking about taking pictures of a single photon in real life -- ergo not simulated. I suspect I misunderstood something.<p>I'm skeptical because.. how would you see a photon? Unless photons themselves give off light as they travel, but that would mean photons emit photons...
More informative link: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213....</a><p>Imaging Systems Applications Paper "Picosecond Camera for Time-of-Flight Imaging": <a href="http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=IS-2011-IMB4" rel="nofollow">http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=IS-2011-IMB4</a><p>ACM paper "Slow art with a trillion frames per second camera": <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2037715.2037730" rel="nofollow">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2037715.2037730</a>
For anyone wondering how the "capturing light in motion" works - the researchers use a very short pulse of light, so when playing back the footage in slow motion, you can see the light pulse moving through the scene.<p>They're not directly observing the photons in motion, they're observing what parts of the scene they're scattering off at a given point.
A (virtual)photon race with a photo finish. It would be totally amazing to see two different visible light waves (red vs. blue) crossing a glass prism and how their velocity difference looks.
Also, wondering if it would be possible to capture light traveling through fiber optic cable (total reflection).
They can't be capturing photons in motion, or capturing anything "moving at the speed of light." That doesn't make any sense. According to relativity, photons don't actually "move" at all. (As I understand it.)
We developed a middleware, which helps to capture and process all these image frames in Realtime running on blade clusters and GPUs.
Think about it as Hadoop for Realtime Image Processing.
Our original application was Semiconductor Inspection machines with large arrays of camera sensors.<p>For more info contact:<p><a href="http://CLASTR.com" rel="nofollow">http://CLASTR.com</a><p>Email: info AT CLASTR DOT com
Interesting. The process is basically like a convolution of a flat wavefront step function over a 3D scene.<p>Now imagine this: instead of registering images, camera <i>emits</i> them in the reverse sequence, effectively making the surrounding environment send concentrated coherent impulses to the point where the laser initially was.<p>Pew-pew.
<i>>"Because all of our pulses look the same"</i><p>Don't misunderstand me, this is really impressive and potentially has some important applications...<p>...but, because the final product showing the plastic bottle is a series of similar scenes, the video seems more akin to a cell or stop motion animation rather than to what is typically considered high speed photography which captures a single event and expands time rather than compressing it. Ten seconds of traditional high speed film contains images captured in a fraction of a second. In this video, ten seconds was captured over the course of many minutes.<p>In other words, there is a significant degree of editorial decision making regarding the manner in which events are depicted - even if that decision making is now handled by software.<p>But cool nonetheless.
I would love to see two parallel mirrors in a scene. I would expect the objects between the mirrors to stay illuminated longer than the other objects and that they would fade out gradually.
"you can see photons moving through space..." I think of this statement and cant help but think it is fundamentally flawed. One cant see the photon moving through space. You might be able to see an electron moving through space because e can emit a photon. But photons cannot emit photons while moving. In essence one only sees the photon when it hits the detector. Physics majors feel free to correct if i am mistaken.
I think they're showing less than 1 trillion fps. Light travels 0.3 mm in a trillionth of a second, so when they play it at 30 fps it should be 9 mm / second. But it passes an apple in about 2 seconds, suggesting more like 30 mm / second.
This reminds me of Searle's relativistic ray tracer: <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle" rel="nofollow">http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle</a><p>In particular, check out "Flash" example in the downloads section.
A more elaborate talk about this work by one of the authors appears at: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKu20y1f_RU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKu20y1f_RU</a>
Does this even make sense?<p>I am not doubting it,that they've made a superb machine, but which photons does the camera catch to see photons that travel parallel to that same camera?
This will be a very interesting technology once it's perfected. It seems to me to be like the led was when it was first invented. A solution in search of a problem. And that can create wonderful innovation.
It sounds like they are taking different phases of the light spreading, and it just looks like the light is traveling.<p>While cool, it's not a true 1 trillion fps camera.<p>Here's true 1 million fps footage:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDoQwIAaXg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDoQwIAaXg</a>