When Megapixels Don’t Matter Anymore: Ramesh Raskar and the MIT Camera that Sees Around Corners

Just for fun this Wednesday, let’s do a science!

When Technology Review created a list of top innovators under 35, Ramesh Raskar obviously had to be on the list. He has been producing many stunning academic papers, all while his name is showing up on patents that real world companies are using all the time.

He’s made a splash of late, along with his fellows at MIT, for new techniques in super-high speed photography. You may recall this picture of a bullet going through an apple, taken with high-speed photography:

This photo is amazing enough for most of us. Well, Rashkar and his crew have figured out a way, basically, to photograph light as if it were a bullet. A bullet travels from 300-900 MPS (meters per second) depending on the kind of bullet. Light travels, if you recall, about 300 million MPS (or 299,792,458 meters per second to be exact.) This means that a super-high-speed camera that you would use to film a bullet would need to be a million times faster, literally, to catch pictures of light like a bullet.

Raskar and his crew have done this, creating a camera 1,000,000,000,000 FPS (frames per second). Go ahead and count the zeroes there… that’s a Trillion FPS!

Like everyone one who is amazing, Raskar eventually got a shot at a TED talk. You can watch it below and see the amazing video of light actually travelling like a bullet. Oh, and they figured out a way to see around corners too–just for good measure!