World’s Fastest Camera – Trillion Frames Per Second

The fastest camera in the world captures images at one trillion exposes per second, making it fast enough to catch the speed of light.

It’s difficult to imagine how a camera could possibly capture a trillion frames per second. The idea that anything can happen a trillion times in the space of a second is difficult to rationalize, but at the MIT Media Lab they have built a camera that can, and in doing so have redefined slow motion photography.

It’s fitting that the evolution of slow motion photography would take place at MIT, where 50 years ago Professor Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton revolutionized the technique when he took a famous photograph of a bullet being shot through an apple, a style that’s been frequently duplicated since.

The new camera is so fast that it can produce a slow motion video of a burst of light traveling from the length of one-liter water bottle, bounce off the cap and travel back to the bottom of the bottle.

We stopped by the lab of Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar and postdoctoral researcher Andreas Velten, the creators of the camera, to see their work first hand.

This is our final segment in a 6 part series filmed on the campus of MIT. We’d like to thank all the Professors and Researchers that welcomed us into their labs, and to Kimberly Allen from the MIT Press Office.