MIT Builds World's Fastest Slowest Camera. Umm...What?

MIT engineers have just built a camera that does mind boggling ONE TRILLION exposures per second. The camera is so awesome that it can capture the movement of light beam through a one liter bottle (we've a video!). Now don't ask us how does that make your lives better. But what you'll see in the video is 100% cool! Andreas Velten, one of the developers of this new camera system calls it the 'ultimate' in slow motion capture. He goes on to say that there's nothing in our Universe that looks fast to this camera.


MIT Camera. Photo Credit: Melanie Gonick

The technology used in creating this camera is called 'streak camera' and it's been deployed in an unusual way. The aperture of this camera is a very narrow slit. Photos aka the particles of light enter through the slit and are subjected to rapidly varying electric field which deflects these photos in a direction perpendicular to the slit.

The camera will find immediate application in laboratories where the motion of light needs to be captured. The main drawback of this camera is that in order to produce the really slow-mo videos, the researchers must perform the photo-shoot several times. The camera takes lot of time to the process the images it's captured in a blink of an eye; making it one of the slowest cameras as well. Why don't we just call it World's Fastest Slowest Camera? For further details, check out the #-Link-Snipped-#. Others can simply watch the following video -