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How fast can your camera shoot photos? 60 frames per second? Pah. 1,000 fps? Puh-lease. What’s that? You have a Phantom camera that’ll shoot one million fps? Whatever. MIT’s new camera will shoot one trillion frames per second.
Let’s put that in some perspective. One trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. So if you shot one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30fps, it’d still take you over 1,000 years to watch it. That’s one boring-ass home movie.
Of course, the “camera†can’t be taken on vacation, and even if it could, there wouldn’t be enough light on even the sunniest beach to support shooting so fast. What MIT’s device (designed by Professor Ramesh Raskar and team) does is to use “femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques†to illuminate a scene and then capture the pulses of laser light. And like all good magic, the kit also uses mirrors: in this case to move the view of the camera.
Let’s put that in some perspective. One trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. So if you shot one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30fps, it’d still take you over 1,000 years to watch it. That’s one boring-ass home movie.
Of course, the “camera†can’t be taken on vacation, and even if it could, there wouldn’t be enough light on even the sunniest beach to support shooting so fast. What MIT’s device (designed by Professor Ramesh Raskar and team) does is to use “femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques†to illuminate a scene and then capture the pulses of laser light. And like all good magic, the kit also uses mirrors: in this case to move the view of the camera.
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