Video: At one trillion frames per second, you can see light move

http://kottke.org/12/08/extreme-slow-motion-photography

by luckylemon • 14 years ago

85 28 14 years ago

mef• 14 years ago

Research details http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Why does the researche call it "trillion fps", when it is really 1/trillionth sec frame? That sort of misrepresentation is supposed to be saved for the news office or the popular press. The achievement is interesting enogh without the deceptive exaggerations.

kghose• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3346609

jeffreyg• 14 years ago

why not just link to the TED video instead of a blog that offers nothing additional? http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that...

luckylemon2• 14 years ago

I just happened to see it on that blog, and wanted to quote its phrasing (which doesn't appear on the video's own page as far as I can see). Sometimes a sentence adds a lot.

mycodebreaks3• 14 years ago

This is a clear violation of HN guideline. HN guideline is: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

acavailhez• 14 years ago

As it was stated before, it's not a 10^-12 seconds camera, it's a very short pulse laser cleverly synchronized with a very short span camera.

This experiment would not work with a moving object for instance. It still has interesting applications though.

phpnode2• 14 years ago

I could be wrong, but as long as the object is moving at "normal" (e.g. significantly less than the speed of light) speeds, this approach would work for moving objects too.

shocks4• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, you are wrong.

The "video" of the pulse of light going through the bottle is actually the result of sending trillions of light pulses through the bottle, taking pictures at very precise (recorded) times and syncing them all together.

Cushman• 14 years ago

I don't really buy this idea that it's not "really" a camera.

Think of it like this: A still camera has a number of small receptors. When you take a photograph, you wind up with a bunch of numbers that average the amount of light that hit each one. It's not a perfect record of the light that was really there-- does that count as a "real" picture? A video camera takes a series of slices at particular moments in time. Information about events that occur between those slices is lost, either blurred out of existence or ignored entirely. Does that count as "real" video?

So, this camera can record a single line once at a precise instant in time. If we want to turn that into a moving picture, we can either parallelize the camera, or serialize the event. So let's say we put together a hundred million of these cameras using mirrors and amplifiers and whatever else we need to record video of a single pulse of light happening once. Let's say we also use a single camera to record video of a hundred million pulses of light which we know will have a variance of less than the resolution of the camera. Let's say we crunch the data from both of these "cameras", and they come out as identical.

Which one is the "real" video?

Anyway, there's a much more salient reason why this wouldn't work for a moving object: As the man pointed out, at this rate, even a speeding bullet would not move perceptibly.

thong• 14 years ago

I think this makes a great TED talk title, but this probably kicks in at some point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

antr• 14 years ago

This URL should point to the source of the video i.e. ted.com not kottke.org

mycodebreaks3• 14 years ago

Seriously, HN is getting worse.

I posted this earlier, and it didn't even make it to the homepage. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392695

This is a clear violation of HN guideline. HN guideline is: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

NeilRShah• 14 years ago

So instead of talking about the content, we are all discussing the way that he posted his content.

Who cares? One click, two clicks. It really doesn't effect me that much.

I think all of us are talking way too much much about how much HN needs to be fixed. Almost every large thread has a reference to how HN is broken. HN may or may not be "going downhill" but if that's all we talk about... It certainly will.

And I recognize the irony in this statement. :)

shocks4• 14 years ago

BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS KARMA?! :O

mycodebreaks3• 14 years ago

Yes, Karma is important

rorrr3• 14 years ago

Again, it's NOT trillion frames per second. Stop spreading this bullshit.

That camera takes extremely short exposures (1 trillionth of a sec), but it cannot take 1 trillion of such exposures in one second. Not even close. Not one billion, not one million (and probably not even one thousand, as there are only a few sensors that can do that).

noselasd• 14 years ago

They capture data at about half a trillion "fps". Then they repeat this over and over and combine the data - as the light from just one exposure is too weak.

rorrr3• 14 years ago

This just shows you don't understand how their technology works. They don't capture the data at half a trillion FPS. They take very short exposures and shift the phase very precisely, which creates an illusion of 1 trillion fps.

pubby• 14 years ago

The resulting video is one trillion frames per second which the title is referring to.

This video shows 10,000 fps video camera which seems to be on a commercially sold camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcQ37OfknJ

rorrr3• 14 years ago

> resulting video is one trillion frames per second

No, the resulting video is 30 frames per second.

Video: At one trillion frames per second, you can see light move

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