World's fastest camera manipulates supercontinuum laser pulses, moonlights at the Hacienda
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted May 1st 2009 6:47AM
posted May 1st 2009 6:47AM
Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles have developed a new imaging system called Steam, or Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging. Billed as the"fastest imaging system ever devised," it works by carefully manipulating so-called supercontinuum laser pulses, for imaging fast-moving or random events, such as communication between neurons. Instead of a flashbulb, this bad boy disperses a fast laser pulse, which then gets stretched in time and detected electronically, for a "shutter speed" of half a billionth of a second. When not being used to "trip people out" at "raves," this camera can capture over six million images a second. Our old PowerShot can't even do half that! According to the head of the research team, Bahram Jalali of UCLA, the next step is to improve the spatial resolution of the technology so they can take crystal clear pictures of the inner structure of cells. The team is also working on a similar technique for 3-D imaging.
[Via BBC]
[Via BBC]
Is that East Side Ravin' Dave?
And there you have it... image capturing without optics, now put one on a satellite and no one can hide.
Again, I must say....
I CAN HAS RAVE TIMES NOW, OONTZ OONTZ!?!
Knock that off. Every time you do that, I say it out loud and can't stop.
Haha.. the whole sentence or just OONTZ OONTZ? ;)
Haha, just "OONTZ OONTZ" but like x12. I think if I were to attempt to vocalize lolspeak, I would punch myself in the face.
H O L Y C O W ! Images of the Neurons firing? Cells doing whatever it is they do at very fast speeds? Fascinating. I wonder if we'll discover new life forms that move faster than our vision can handle. Or life forms that move so slowly, we didn't know they were alive. I'll be happy with confirmation of some theories I have about how the brain functions, and what constitutes consciousness. :)
But, watching all that footage might seem excrutiatingly slow. 6 Million frames a second? How long do you have to watch to roll through 1 second of footage? 6,000,000 / 24 or 30 fps = about 55 hours. :o Forget the popcorn, bring a pillow.
Hah, nice calculation there, and a good point, because even though it seems to be destined to be used by computers to analyze you will always have stuff where you need/want to see things to judge what is happening, and what you say is true, you''ll need a whole lot of free time to watch it without missing stuff.
maybe now i can finally have a picture of my (talkative female) friend with her mouth closed
"Traditional blood analyzers can count cells and extract information about their size, but they cannot take pictures of every cell because no camera is fast and sensitive enough for the job."
Who knew, we got hyperspeed blood! And I always thought it was a bit slow.
"The study was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)"
The war against low FPS.
They'll need a computer to analyze the footage and report what it sees.
"Hal, did you see anything"
"I'm not telling you, Dave"
I for one welcome our robot overlords dressed line Japanese tourists.
ok where is my weed so i can fully enjoy this psychedelic picture!!!!
I think you want acid.
Leave the weed to those of us who like to fully enjoy Spongebob Squarepants DVDs.
Why does a picture for a super-fast shutter have motion blur?
That's not actually a picture from the device, it's a filler to not get you upset from only seeing text.
OONTZ! OONTZ!
and i thought the DARPA chief died of a heart-attack? 0.o
+10 for the Hacienda reference.
Hacienda? You know it's just a load of flats now right? Assuming you mean the manchester one anyhow. sad.
Here's a picture of that team, funded by DARPA, don't laugh, or panic please :)
http://www.iran-daily.com/1387/3259/html/science.htm
And here's a much more detailed breakdown of how it works (link found on keisuke goda's page so I'm assuming it's somewhat sound):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8025211.stm
Imagine what crazy things the mythbusters could do with this camera.
No 24 fps video? Its crap.
That's...over 9000?
i wish we had a camera like this back when they were testing nukes! You could see everything that happens!
cytherea @ 6,000,000 FPS = WIN
lulz
We can entrust cameras to Japanese.
Nippon! Nippon!
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