1,000,000,000,000 Frames/Second Photography – Ramesh Raskar




Ramesh Raskar: An Immigrant’s Story
Big Think Editors on September 30, 2011, 2:04 PM

What’s the Latest Development?

Born to a family of farmers in India, Ramesh Raskar was first inspired to pursue computer graphics after seeing the special effects of Jurassic Park. His story is not an unfamiliar one for a first generation immigrant: “Nobody on my father’s or mother’s side of the family has even a high school education. But my father, being an electronics engineer, made sure all his children focused on education rather than farming.” Since getting his Ph.D. in North Carolina, he has worked at the M.I.T. media lab creating revolutionary new electronic devices.

What’s the Big Idea?

Among the devices he has invented is a four-flash camera that enables the kind of sketching familiar to most from the 1985 music video for the hit pop song “Take on Me” by the Norwegian band A-Ha. Currently he is working on a camera that can see around corners: “It bounces ultrashort bursts of laser light off a rigid surface—the wall opposite an open door, for instance—at several different angles and measures the time it takes the light to return to the camera.” In order for the camera to measure the flight time of light particles, it must take a trillion exposures a second.
Source: http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/ramesh-raskar-an-immigrants-story

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21 responses to “1,000,000,000,000 Frames/Second Photography – Ramesh Raskar”

  1. Oh my f***!!! I have thought about this for the first time years back "if we could go faster than light what would happen" and this is almost exactly what I pictured but I also pictured us being able to see into the past. For instance when we see a star we are seeing the light from millions of years ago so if we were millions of light years away following Earths light source we would be able to see a timeline of earth and what actually happened at the beginning, and it's only going to happen when we combine this technology with an extremely powerful telescope and we need to have conquered the speed of light before we could do this so it's probably not going to be in our lifetime.

    While some of you have read this you will probably think I'm insane but If I pictured what he is demonstrating here to be what I thought it was then that has got to be true, I'm no science professor but I've always been curious about the universe like way too much I love discovering things about earth and the universe

  2. I'm confused. Every photon we see must have entered the camera lens (ie at approx 90 degrees to the direction of travel through the bottle). Is every photon we see one which started off in the "packet" but happened to bounce off something on its journey through the bottle at the right angle to hit the camera lens? Or have I misunderstood the whole thing?

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