I know this sounds like something in a sci-fi movie or a superhero comic, but this is a real-world technology we've made possible with a camera that is aware of the travel time of light, an imaging technique that can create movies of light in motion with an effective rate approaching a trillion frames per second: the speed of light.Canon recalls thousands of T4i DSLRs for allergy risk.
Before I joined the MIT faculty in 2008, I had done deep research in "computational photography," a field of new imaging techniques dramatically improving the capture and synthesis of photos. But, I knew there was more to photography than just depicting what the eye can see. I wanted to create a camera that could see beyond the line of sight. The speed of light isn't infinite: light travels about a foot per billionth of a second.
I spoke to top researchers in ultrafast lasers and photonics to understand what was currently possible. When I did, most of them asked some version of: "Why? Why spend years building a camera to look around corners when no commercial application is screaming for it and no funding agency has a call for it?" In addition, it's rare to shoot light pulses and analyze at such high speeds in large environments. Ultra-fast imaging experiments are usually limited to centimeter- or smaller-size samples.
No comments:
Post a Comment