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MIT's Media Lab has taken slow motion video to a whole new level by building a system capable of capturing moving subjects at 1 trillions frames a second, fast enough to capture pulses of light parading through a 1-liter soda bottle. Light travels at about 671 million miles per hour, but it can't outrun MIT's custom camera setup, nor can anything else in the universe.
"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab.
MIT's setup uses a recent technology called a streak camera, which captures light-photons through a narrow slit. Late-arriving photos are deflected more than early-arriving ones. This produces a two-dimensional image, only one of which is spatial. The other dimension -- the one corresponding to the degree of deflection -- is time, so the image represents the time of arrival of photons passing through a one-dimensional slice of space, MIT explains.
In order to produce super slow motion videos, Velten and his team had to constantly reposition the streak camera as multiple pulses of light traveled through the bottle, a process that gradually built up a two-dimensional image. The process is better explained (and visualized) in the embedded video above.
Best use scenarios from a practical standpoint are applications where light scatters or bounces around as it strikes various surfaces. An ultrasound with light is one potential application, though MIT Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar sees it also being used in everything from industrial and scientific applications to consumer photography.
Image Credit: M. Scott Brauer, MIT
Comments are closed on this article
Morete
December 15, 2011 at 6:15am
Yes, "this can possibly be used in future medical imaging". We already know what the image of the disease or trauma looks like. We need better treatments and cures, not more expensive cutting edge images that drive up costs and health insurance premiums.
Neufeldt2002
December 14, 2011 at 9:55am
"Light travels at about 671 million miles per hour, but it can't outrun MIT's custom camera setup, nor can anything else in the universe."
I wonder if neutrinos can outrun the camera? Although it has not yet been confirmed, all indicators point to neutrinos being faster than light and the camera was set up to catch only light. Yes, I know that you can't actually see neutrinos but I couldn't help wondering about it.
punditguy
December 14, 2011 at 9:29am
> a process that gradually built up a two-dimensional image
Shouldn't that be something like "a process that gradually built up an image in two spacial dimensions"?
titan8813
December 14, 2011 at 9:24am
671 miles per hour is slower than the speed of sound. I think light travels about 186,000+ miles per SECOND.
timlider
December 14, 2011 at 9:28am
Yup Light is 186,000 miles per second.
I swear I did not see the million in there before.
