A Camera Is Fast Enough to Record Light, Works at a Trillion FPS

Seeing light traveling has been done in simulations and can even be somewhat tracked with sufficiently advanced technical setups, but not by a camera.

That is, it didn't used to be possible before some folks at MIT created a camera that could.

It will probably still take a decade or two for everyone to have image recording gizmos that can snap pictures faster than light travels, so to speak.

Still, the fact remains that a team from MIT media lab created a camera with a shutter speed of one trillion exposures per second.

This is enough to record light making the journey from point A to point B, and those points don't even have to be that far apart either.

In fact, even though it took replicating the experiment hundreds of times, the researchers did manage to piece together a stop-motion footage of a laser traveling through a soda bottle.

“An ultimate dream is, how do you create studio-like lighting from a compact flash? How can I take a portable camera that has a tiny flash and create the illusion that I have all these umbrellas, and sport lights, and so on?” asks Raskar, the NEC Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

“With our ultrafast imaging, we can actually analyze how the photons are traveling through the world. And then we can recreate a new photo by creating the illusion that the photons started somewhere else.”

There is one drawback, in that it takes ages (figuratively speaking) to process the images taken by the camera.

Thus, it was nicknamed “the world's slowest fastest camera” by Raskar himself.

The cumulative costs of making the streak camera was $250,000, and the team got the money from Bawendi, a pioneer in research on quantum dots.

Check out the video below if you want to see the thing in action.