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The future of cameras and slomo: how does 1 Trillion frames per second sound?


jcs
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http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRV1em--gaM .

Mind blowing! A camera system so fast it can record light itself moving through time. One example shows reverse causality- that means what was recorded should really happen after what is seen. They have to correct for it in post using concepts from Einstein's Relativity Theory! This may have implications in helping us better understand the nature of reality itself.

This is approaching the maximum speed humans would find interesting for slomo. At this speed, watching a bullet travel through an apple would take a year to watch.

Seeing around corners with reconstructed reflected light: there are many more amazing things coming in future cameras. Ultimately, in cameras as small or smaller than your cell phone.

Beyond the technology- there are some very cool creative possibilities for science fiction stories (until this tech is available- then it won't be science fiction anymore).

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Ancient Greeks had a mind exercise that involved infinite numbers and division.  They reckoned that since numbers are infinite that any time between two actual moments must therefore be infinite.  Transfinite infinity.  Zeno's Paradox.

A trillion moments within a second?  That's getting close. I like that notion.  Time is not just how we perceive it.

Excuse me while I go eat some pot brownies now, dude.

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Saw this years ago and found the videos unremarkable until I realized that I was actually watching light waves propagate and bounce. Pretty amazing stuff. There is one major downside to this tech that makes it uses very limited in that this camera can do what it does by recording the same event over and over and over again and compiling the results. Hence in can only record events that can be precisely repeated over and over again. 

This is a limitation that I don't think can be overcome since to record light travelling as in the video you posted would require sampling that light with something travelling faster than the speed of light. That is impossible in physics as we know it.

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Saw this years ago and found the videos unremarkable until I realized that I was actually watching light waves propagate and bounce. Pretty amazing stuff. There is one major downside to this tech that makes it uses very limited in that this camera can do what it does by recording the same event over and over and over again and compiling the results. Hence in can only record events that can be precisely repeated over and over again. 

This is a limitation that I don't think can be overcome since to record light travelling as in the video you posted would require sampling that light with something travelling faster than the speed of light. That is impossible in physics as we know it.

​Bro, get on my level. Buy an f.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 aperature lens. srsly get good :D

 

That and a 10000000000000000000000 shutter speed.

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There is one major downside to this tech that makes it uses very limited in that this camera can do what it does by recording the same event over and over and over again and compiling the results. Hence in can only record events that can be precisely repeated over and over again. 

This is a limitation that I don't think can be overcome since to record light travelling as in the video you posted would require sampling that light with something travelling faster than the speed of light. That is impossible in physics as we know it.

​I think what they meant in their description of how it works is that multiple 'relatively slow' sensors are precisely triggered, one after the other with ultra-high precision (femtosecond accuracy?). The limitation is the recording time length- limited by the number of sensors. What would be trippy is if they slow it down even more and find the light completely disappearing then reappearing as it moves- something like going in and out of phase with our universe and a higher-dimensional state we don't currently understand (related to String theory predictions).

Regarding brownies- not that I'm recommending trying this at home (especially where it's illegal), however Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA double helix) Kary Mullis (inventor of PCR- used to amplify DNA- a major breakthrough), Steve Jobs (he did something with computers I think ;)), the Beatles (wrote a good song or two) and many more, all used LSD. DMT is perhaps today's 'LSD', with many people traveling to south America for mind-expansion therapy (psychotropics are now also being considered for PTSD as the truth about the war on drugs is becoming more well known (hint: it's all about the money)). We're starting development of a new documentary with elements related to addiction and it's clear that some of these banned drugs can be very helpful in a variety of therapies. For example, using (magic) mushrooms to help cure addiction to alcohol. Each case is different, and substituting one addiction for another isn't a good idea though the results of recent findings are very enlightening. In terms of human suffering and harm to life, if we flipped the law and made alcohol and cigarettes illegal and everything else legal, there would be much less pain and suffering. This is already happening slowly, and marijuana is now legal even in Washington DC, but it's still illegal on the federal level. The battle for and against is not about health, crime, etc. It's about money. Legalization (through laws voted on by the people) revolves around taxation which apparently is going to be more profitable/powerful vs. the corpo-pharma-FDA machine.

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Interesting thread and good remarks. I always felt that people who call for higher frame rates subconsciously want to stop motion. On the relativity of time (and the perception of time) I once read a good book (I think the title was Time). The author said that if you were sucked into a black hole, this would happen so fast that you wouldn't notice how all your molecules were compressed. A guy with a very good telescope, watching the tragedy from earth, would see you hovering in front of the abyss completely motionless. Every now and then, becoming old and grey, he would check the status quo, but wasn't able to tell if you moved forward at all.

The heart of moving pictures is present constantly slipping away. Fleeting moments. Best captured at lower frame rates. 

Not long ago (relatively) I watched an experimental film about motion blur (title was motion blur). Time lapse with successively longer exposure times. Made the cars on a highway disappear, made the fish in a fish tank disappear. A trillion fps will make us see light move, but will practically turn any living thing to stone.

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Ebrahim- lighting is kind of trippy as they are recording the photon wave/packets! Just one light source, a titanium sapphire laser (pulsed at 13 nanoseconds).

dhessel- re-reading the article it appears they can record 480 frames per 'movie' without repeated sampling. Only issue is that's only one scanline ;) . So they do indeed need to currently shoot the same scene over again per scanline. It would appear with refinement and scaling, an updated camera could capture all scanlines in one go.

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So who of the greatest film directors has used hallucinogens before? Has somebody confessed yet? This is quite interesting by the way. I think in the creative field, using hallucinogens gives you an edge, someone disagrees ;)

​Jodorowski is the first to pop into my mind. Still, I don't think psychedelic usage is exactly a well-kept secret in any of the creative fields. 

 

 

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So who of the greatest film directors has used hallucinogens before? Has somebody confessed yet? This is quite interesting by the way. I think in the creative field, using hallucinogens gives you an edge, someone disagrees ;) ? ​

Well, in the seventies the majority of directors experimented with drugs. Among others Coppola (as you can read in Biskinds book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). Could someone with a straight mind (quotation from Inherent Vice: 'Straight is cool') have made Apocalypse Now? Kubrick, with his famous Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sequence, stated he never tried drugs. I did, and I'd say they shouldn't be used as an escape but for the expansion of consciousness (Huxley). You get difficulties taking anybody seriously who describes himself as 'down to earth'.

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