One Trillion Frames Per Second: The Science of Capturing Light in Motion

Ramesh Raskar joined the MIT Media Lab in 2008, where he heads up the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. For some time, the researcher has drawn inspiration from another MIT professor, Harold Edgerton, a pioneer of stop-action photography, who famously photographed a bullet moving through an apple in 1964. Decades later, Raskar and his MIT crew have taken photography to a new level, creating imaging hardware and software that can capture light as it moves. They can visualize pictures as if they were recorded at a rate of one trillion frames per second. His cutting edge work in femto-photography is all on display above.

If you want to get deeper into Raskar’s world, you can check out his free MIT course, Computational Camera and Photography, which is located in the Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence section of our collection of Free Online Courses.

via Roger Ebert


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Comments (3)
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  • A trillion frames a second. Observing light in motion, seeing around corners! Mind boggling technology, and great promise for the future.

  • Sam Turner says:

    My theory was derived from watching nature. I wondered why, when I see an ant fall so fast, it takes no damage when falling from a great height. I realised that perhaps, due to Einstein’s theories of light = matter, we absorb not only light, but all perception and reality, each moment, differently dependent on our gravitational influence = size!!
    So the ant, sees us move slower than we see ourselves move, it sees itself move slower than we see it move, and we see it faster than it sees itself!!
    rogerthat155 in reply to rogerthat155 (Show the comment) 1 second ago
    Then I wondered, if the same happened in the realms of gargantually large, and subatomically small, if so, there are enormous beings and entities that we are seeing in ULTRA slow motion, the inner workings of, appearing to us as stars and this explosion, and retracting of the universe (sped up may appear to be a ball? An atom, or electron, or smaller?) and ENTIRE UNIVERSES existing at superspeed right before our eyes!!!!
    Please!! Apply this tech to a microscope!!!!
    rogerthat155 in reply to rogerthat155 (Show the comment) 1 second ago

  • Chen says:

    Sam Turner – So forces are relative to our perception?? Wow! I never thought about it like that… Very enlightening, thank you!

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