MIT researchers build a camera to capture visuals at the speed of light

A team of innovative researchers at MIT has invented a virtual slow motion camera, which can capture visuals at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. The camera is fast enough that it can capture slow motion of light passing through the length of a bottle. Developers of the camera have posted a video clip (see it below the article) to show the camera’s capability to capture light traveling from one end of to the other in slow motion.

Camera to capture at the speed of light comes

According to Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and one person behind the project, the camera can capture photons moving through air in great clarity and slow motion. See, photons travel in air million times faster than a bullet. But the trillion frame-per-second video camera can capture their movement simply.

The slow motion camera is built with a heavily modified Streak Tube. Aperture of a camera with Streak Tube is a thin slit. Photons come in the camera through the slit and go through an electric field, which can redirect the particles of light in a direction at a 90 degree angle to the slit. As electric field changes rapidly, it can “deflect late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.” As a result, we get video of photons in seamless clarity and perfection, proponents of the camera explain.

The camera is the first of its kind in the world. As per Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, the camera is ultimate in slow motion capturing and there is no other camera in the universe that can capture moving particles of light in this clarity. Its high rate of capturing visuals in slow motion has awarded it a nickname, “the world’s slowest fastest camera.” Well, the slow motion camera captures visuals quite fast to get best slow motion video.

In fact, the camera needs to pass through many more experiments. Raskar, Velten and Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry are further to test the camera under various experiments. The same experiment of passing light pulse through a bottle will be repeated several times to see how effective the camera is in capturing at the speed of light. It takes only a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, for the light to pass through a one litter bottle. But the new camera from MIT researchers can capture its passage from one end to the other.

Raskar describes three major applications for the slow motion camera; medical imaging, industrial or scientific imaging and consumer photography. For all three purposes, the camera may be useful. In consumer photography, a high end camera with huge exposure rate can take amazing pictures. “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,” Raskar adds.

Via: MITNews