In 1964 MIT professor Harold Edgerton, pioneer of stop-action photography, famously took a photo of a bullet piercing an apple using exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. Inspired by his work, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could capture not just a bullet (traveling at 850 meters per second) but light itself (nearly 300 million meters per second). Stop a moment to take that in: photographing light as it moves. For that, they built a camera and software that can visualize pictures as if they are recorded at 1 trillion frames per second. The same photon-imaging technology could also be used to create a camera that can peer "around" corners, by exploiting specific properties of the photons when they bounce off surfaces and objects. Among the other projects that Raskar is leading, with the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group, are low-cost eye care devices, a next generation CAT-Scan machine and human-computer interaction systems. Our special report presents you with the full TED presentation and much more.
Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a Trillion Frames per Second
(Note: This is a Flash Video Source and can't be seen on Apple iDevices.)
MIT Invents Next Generation Femto-Photography
MIT has stated that they have built a camera that could look around corners and beyond the line of sight. The camera uses light that travels from the object to the camera indirectly, by reflecting off walls or other obstacles, to reconstruct a 3D shape.
Potential applications include search and rescue planning in hazardous conditions, collision avoidance for cars, and robots in industrial environments. Transient imaging also has significant potential benefits in medical imaging that could allow endoscopes to view around obstacles inside the human body.
The new invention, which we call femto-photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical inversion techniques.
How to See Around Corners
In a recent report we pointed to an Apple Inc. patent application touching on 5D technology and our second source for this report, which we note below, they present information relating to 5D Light Transport. If you're a photography or science buff, our second source provides you with a bonanza of links and information on this subject matter.
