The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may not be known for its moviemaking skills, but an incredible new film out of the school’s Media Lab has ricocheted around the Web at the speed of well…you get it.
The new video captures action at one-trillion exposures per second, enough to see an individual photon traveling across a one-liter bottle and reflecting off its cap. Watch it here:
Perhaps most amazing of all, the video was created from a camera derived from archaic photographic technology.
MIT’s Camera Culture Group whipped up a “virtual slow-motion camera” that is an array of 500 sensors each triggered at a trillionth-of-a second delay.
The assembly, which cost $250,000, was created using a streak camera, a rotating mirror, several other mirrors, a pulsing laser and a series of algorithms to stitch together the streak camera’s still, one dimensional snapshots of the photon moving down the bottle.
A streak camera has an aperture that’s just a narrow slit, as opposed to the wide, circular aperture found in most consumer and professional cameras.
Streak cameras have been around since the 1970s, when they were created to record the movement of particles. But they are based on the high-speed rotating drum cameras of the 1930s, which recorded transient phenomena by imprinting “streaks” of reflected light onto film, as streak camera company Hamamatsu explains.
Still, the use of computer technology and lasers that weren’t around in the 1930s has lead MIT to the eye-popping (literally) breakthrough of today.
“Such a camera may be useful in medical imaging, industrial or scientific use, and the future, even for consumer photography,” said Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar in the video, “In medical imaging, now we can do ultrasound with light, because one we can analyze how light will scatter volumetrically within the body.”
But as the top commenter on YouTube aptly noted: “This is going to totally revolutionize porn.”
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
Facebook Conversations