That fancy high-speed Phantom camera is pretty much a child’s toy when compared to MIT’s new hardware which can record at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second. Fast enough to capture slow motion footage of light waves. More »
How fast can your camera shoot photos? 60 frames per second? Pah. 1,000 fps? Puh-lease. What’s that? You have a Phantom camera that’ll shoot one million fps? Whatever. MIT’s new camera will shoot one trillion frames per second.
Let’s put that in some perspective. One trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. So if you shot one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30fps, it’d still take you over 1,000 years to watch it. That’s one boring-ass home movie.
Of course, the “camera” can’t be taken on vacation, and even if it could, there wouldn’t be enough light on even the sunniest beach to support shooting so fast. What MIT’s device (designed by Professor Ramesh Raskar and team) does is to use “femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques” to illuminate a scene and then capture the pulses of laser light. And like all good magic, the kit also uses mirrors: in this case to move the view of the camera.
Nor does the camera run for a full second. The movies are 480 frames long, and show a slice in time of just 1.71 picoseconds.
The result is a movie of an advancing wave of light. The individual frames can also be colorized to show a rainbow of wavefronts:
If your jaw isn’t on the ground right now, then shame on you. If you want to see more, you should head the team’s project page at MIT where you can see such wonders as a single pulse of light traveling the length of a soda bottle in one billionth of a second, and wavefronts rippling over still-life setups as if they were waves of water lapping at a beach.
Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second [MIT Camera Culture]
[Image courtesy of MIT / M. Scott Brauer]
Continue reading MIT builds camera that can capture at the speed of light (video)
MIT builds camera that can capture at the speed of light (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
[Image courtesy of MIT / Melanie Gonick]
Inefficient? MIT’s new chip software doesn’t know the meaning of the word originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Just in time for All Hallow’s Eve shenanigans, scientists at MIT’s DARPA and Boeing funded Chembots program have just introduced an uber creepy self-propelling robot quite capable of leading the robot apocalypse single-handedly. The automaton moves with the help of a pneumatic battery — a power source that utilizes a hydrogen peroxide catalyst to inflate a soft silicone pod, in turn forcing the bot forward. With electropermanent magnets to regulate built-in valves, all it takes is a small current to activate the bot, which can regulate just how much H202 it will employ for a completely solo and super creepy zombie-like C-walk. Jump past the break to check out the video… if you dare.
Continue reading Self-moving robot leads automatons in impending robot apocalypse (video)
Self-moving robot leads automatons in impending robot apocalypse (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Did you have trouble learning language skills at a young age? It’s probably because you didn’t have the right teacher. And by “the right teacher,” we mean the right robotic dragon, naturally. This cuddly little mythical beast is the joint creation of researchers at Northeastern University, MIT and Harvard — some of whom were behind the decidedly creepier Nexi bot. It’s part of a National Science Foundation-funded program to help young children learn language skills, suggesting that forming a bond with a teacher plays an important role in the educational process. The dragon will be brought to preschool classes to help test out this hypothesis. Hopefully a robotic knight will also be on-hand, just in case.
Robot dragon teaches kids language skills, battles impulse to terrorize city originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
T(ether) is a bit like that amazing Reality Fighters game we saw on the PS Vita, except it’s more tranquil and it works slightly differently. The tablet-based technology uses motion capture cameras to track users’ heads and the orientation of the device itself, building a 1:1 spatial connection between real and virtual coordinates and allowing “intuitive interaction with volumetric data.” As you’ll see in the clip after the break, this equates to some pretty neat tricks. And, if you throw in multiple users wearing motion-tracked gloves, things get even more Eastside.
Continue reading Hey yo, T(ether) technology tracks rap gestures in 3D
Hey yo, T(ether) technology tracks rap gestures in 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Sintering is a common process for creating copper heat sinks that involves packing powdered metals into a particular shape and baking it in a vacuum. A funny thing happens though, if you leave out the vacuum part of the equation: you don’t get a solid shape, but a porous pile of particles with hollow, nanowire whiskers sticking out of it. The serendipitous discovery could lead to a new way to make heat sinks for everything from CPUs to boilers at power plants. Now researchers at MIT are trying the process with practically every material they can get their hands on. Of particular interest is zirconium, which could be used with fuel rods in nuclear reactors to improve efficiency. The idea of whisker-covered heat sinks may sound strange, but the potential for improving thermal management across a range of applications is huge. Just don’t try and pet it — these things tend to get a little toasty.
More efficient heat sinks could sport nanowire whiskers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As you may have noticed from the pace of research over the past few years, graphene is promising to make a whole lot of things a whole lot better. Now, it seems, you can also add camera sensors to the list. A team of MIT researchers recently discovered that graphene can serve as a photodetector over a “very wide energy range,” and that it works particularly well in infrared light, where other types of detectors often come up short. That, the researchers say, could open to the door to everything from better nightvision systems to more advanced detectors for astronomical telescopes — not to mention more inexpensive camera sensors in general, since graphene is cheap to work with. What’s more, the researchers also suggest that those same light-detecting abilities could make graphene a good material for collecting solar energy, although they note that there’s still much more research needed to determine if it’s truly an efficient means of generating energy.
MIT researchers suggest graphene could be used to build a better camera sensor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Some graphene, looking thin and strong. Illustration CORE-Materials/Flickr
Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, could end up making a pretty good camera sensor. Researchers at MIT have discovered that graphene can turn light into electricity, but not the way you’d think.
Unlike camera sensors and solar panels which rely on the photovoltaic effect, graphene creates a current because of a temperature difference. When light shines on its surface, it heats the electrons within, but “the lattice of carbon nuclei that forms graphene’s backbone remains cool.” This temperature difference produces the electricity.
Normally, this only occurs with very high energy light sources (lasers!) or very low-temperature materials. Graphene manages it with daylight and at room temperature.
The material surely has many uses (not least as a way to generate solar energy), but it turns out that graphene would make a good camera sensor. It detects infrared light, for example (good for spooky effects), and is also made from cheap, readily available carbon. Research is still young, but perhaps it could lead to a decent camera finally fitting into the supermodel-thin iPod Touch.
Graphene shows unusual thermoelectric response to light [MIT News]
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