So hi guys, long time no post and all that. ; There's no big story of why I've been away, my attention just tends to wander. ; I've got a backlog of subjects I could post about and this feels like as good a time as any to try unloading one of them. The subject is of what is basically the most extremely slow motion camera ever created. ; A camera with a high enough frame rate that you can watch a pulse of light move, rather watch the reflections created from the pulse moving along the scene. ; Yes, it slows things down enough that you can see light move. It also involves a bit of trickery, and isn't quite.. honest, in that you're not really looking at video captured from a single event. ; At least if I understand the concept behind it correctly. ; It seems that this camera works by scanning in one horizontal line at a time, so the light pulse being recorded has to be repeated many times, and the final video is made up of slices of a bunch of events. ; The inventor of this calls it a virtual camera. ; But I can't freak out enough about how extreme this tech is. ; An article on it states that if a bullet was recorded at the same frame rate and covering the same distance as the light pulse, the resulting video would be three years long. ; This is something I never imagined I'd be able to see. If you want to read more about the tech behind this, I suppose the blog post that first alerted me to this would be a good starting point: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang ... slow-m.php That's a blog I regularly read, it's normally about issues of cosmology, the large scale questions of the current state and history of the universe. A link with just the video where you can watch light move is up next: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... RbLLYCiyGE Or a video with a little background on how the camera works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... tsXgODHMWk In that last video, the creator of the camera suggests that this tech might have a future in consumer cameras. ; Somehow I doubt it, I just don't see a cathode ray tube ending up being incorporated into a consumer digicam. ; I don't quite see how this could work, but he's saying that with a camera using this kind of a system (but presumably made practical so that it can be used to record real world scenes) you could use a small camera flash to illuminate your scene, record the travelling photons as they interact with the scene, and then somehow post process it to make it look as if it was lit by a more complicated studio lighting setup. ; I almost think he's talking about mapping the reflections to make a 3d model of the entire scene and then calculate how a series of studio strobes would have illuminated it and adjust the image accordingly. I am intrigued though, he suggests that in ten years time you could have software on your cell phone that could use something like this to analyze light reflections off of a piece of fruit in the supermarket to see if it's ripe. ; He appears to be suggesting that this makes consumer lidar (the laser equivalent of radar) not only possible but so capable that it could be used to analyze the physical properties of the things you point it at, not just scan the shape.
Interesting concept that raises a whole trainload of questions about their methods. Theoretically controlled fusion is possible too, but saying it and doing it are two very different things. Erich
