Anna Lee T.

futurejournalismproject:

MIT’s New Camera Takes One Trillion Frames Per Second

As Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab, puts it, “It takes a very fast picture.”

Via MIT News:

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 a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom…

…The trillion-frame-per-second imaging system, which the researchers have presented both at the Optical Society’s Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging conference and at Siggraph, is a spinoff of another Camera Culture project, a camera that can see around corners. That camera works by bouncing light off a reflective surface — say, the wall opposite a doorway — and measuring the time it takes different photons to return. But while both systems use ultrashort bursts of laser light and streak cameras, the arrangement of their other optical components and their reconstruction algorithms are tailored to their disparate tasks.

Click through to learn what the camera is and isn’t, and if you’re particularly geeky, how it actually works.

H/T: ExtremeTech.

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