Technology to photograph "Light"!!! Wait... What??

[Vyom]

Video With 1 Trillion Frames Per Second Makes Light Look Slow

In photography, a shutter speed of one eight-thousandth of a second — the quickest setting on Canon’s new EOS 1D-X pro digital SLR camera — is considered extremely fast. Some enterprising researchers at MIT just assembled a video that blows that spec out of the water by a factor of about 100 million.

Scientists at MIT’s MediaLab have developed a video technique that results in videos made from 1 trillion frames per second — fast enough to show a light pulse moving across a room. Nothing moves faster than light, so the ability to reduce its progress to a slow-motion video is nothing short of miraculous. The team recorded a light pulse’s progress through the length of a Coke bottle.

The camera uses a piece of equipment known as a streak camera, which is basically a slit that lets light pass through. The camera then uses a rapidly changing electrical field to deflect the light, measuring not just the photons coming through the slit, but also when they arrived. The result is a plot of light coming through that slit over time.

To create a picture that’s more than just a slit, they had to record the “video” again and again, reflecting the light off mirrors and changing the angle every time so they would get a different part of the picture. Although the light takes an infinitesimal amount of time to move through the bottle, it took the researchers over an hour to get the material they needed — hundreds of thousands of data sets, amounting to about a trillion recorded “frames.” They then crunch those numbers to manageable rates to produce the video seen above.

The methodology shows the main limitation of the system: It can only be used for recording something you can “shoot” over and over.

So what good is trillion-frame-per-second video capture? Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar suggests medical imaging that currently uses ultrasound to scan inside a person could use light instead, presumably leading to more precising imaging (think picture-perfect sonograms of unborn children).

Another application could be better simulating studio lighting with a standalone camera flash. With a better understanding of how light progresses through a scene, a sophisticated flash could make pics from cellphone cameras look like they were taken by professionals.

[sam]

maybe Wachowski brothers will be interested in this. their next movie will show hero dodging light in slow motion

great achievement & nice share vineet

[Vyom]

Well, I can only wish for another movie from Wachowski brothers... (which may not be that far, (Cloud Atlas ) )

It's incredible how something which is theoritically impossible, is still made possible, with such a technology...!

[NitrousNavneet]

He is an INDIAN..............

[Vyom]

Well, technically, one of the member of the team, which is a part of this project, is an Indian.
So, why is this so surprising btw?

[lywyre]

If you watch the video, you will see the light disappear before the shadow appears. Mind boggling.

[Anorion]

one of the basics of photography is that every photograph is an image of a particular, that is that particular tree, or that particular flower, or that particular moment in time, this funda has been thrown out of the window lol, the photograph of the light beam is not a video of one light beam but of several, so while it shows what it looks like, it is not showing the real thing, although the difference is not appreciable at all in this case

doing this with actors is impossible, maybe a robot that goes through the same dodging motion over and over again then its possible, then again, they can just as easily animate the effect

[abhidev]

maybe Wachowski brothers will be interested in this. their next movie will show hero dodging light in slow motion

Rajnikanth does it by default

[Zangetsu]

good share vineet

[thetechfreak]

Thanks for the share Vineet 369

[Alok]

Great achievement. Nice Share...

[Vyom]

doing this with actors is impossible, maybe a robot that goes through the same dodging motion over and over again then its possible, then again, they can just as easily animate the effect

You are absolutely right mate on that point. If a thing can't be repeated with the same accuracy like that at the first time, it can't be captured with precision.

The video of light being passing through is nothing more than a high FPS slideshow of snaps taken at various intervals of time, by recording different but same action over and over again.

But, this is how technology progresses. Which seems impossible today, won't in the near future. Just hoping to be alive until I see a real Time Slice video of "Photons" on Youtube in MHD!*

PS: What's up with people thanking me, for sharing this!
Don't we all share something, which never fails to amaze us!

Spoiler:

It's just that I don't like listening thank, for something which I love to do!
* Btw, MHD = Mega High Def!

[iamp4prathamesh]

Thanks for the share bro !