The World's Fastest Camera Can See Around Corners By Imaging Lasers At 15 Billion Frames A Second

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Motherboard. It was so cool that we couldn't help but share it, but see the original piece here.

Your fancy DSLR’s shutter speed has got nothing on this: A team of researchers is developing a camera that can capture images—videos, to be precise—at the speed of light. That makes it the fastest camera there is, and has the intriguing application that it could see objects around corners.

I saw the camera at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition, where Jonathan Leach from Heriot Watt University explained that it’s fast enough to see individual beams of light move through space. To demonstrate, take a look at this image of a laser that I took with my regular smartphone camera. The laser looks like a static green line bouncing off surfaces and criss-crossing over itself, just as it does to the human eye.

The camera, however, sees the laser beam moving through the air as the light bounces off one surface to another. Here’s a snippet of video it captured of that same laser beam:

What you’re seeing there is 15 billion frames per second, with an effective exposure time of 67 picoseconds (a picosecond is a trillionth of a second).

So how does that enable the camera to see round corners? We’re not talking about sticking the sensor around a corner and operating it at a right angle, like the smart guns we saw earlier this month; the camera should be able to detect objects hidden around a wall without it needing to be physically in the line of sight. It's a similar goal as that of a camera developed by MIT, but the way it works is a bit different, and Leach is confident they'll be able to get it to work in real time.

It sees around corners by recording the scattered light cast by an object hidden from view. Say there’s a person around the corner: the laser bounces off whatever surface (like a wall) to hit them, and the light then bounces back via the same route. The camera’s 32 by 32 pixel sensor—the part that looks a bit like a golden postage stamp—is super-sensitive, and each pixel can detect individual photons that come back to it.

For the rest of this article, head over to Motherboard for all the nitty-gritty pixel glory.

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