Femtofotografia is a research field that deals with capturing images at very high speed.
What is it for? And who knows. To many things. First of all to 'photograph' the light, to study its behaviour. But can be useful to even do amazing things, currently out of our reach, like photograph an image of an object hidden around a corner through the reflection of photons on an intermediate surface, on the object itself and then on new on intermediate surface towards the photographic lens.
Three years ago Prof. Ramesh Raskar's team surprised the world with the video of the first experiments (we present it again). The last developments tell us that the initial goal has been reached with success: There exists today a camera capable of capturing a trillion frames per second. To give you an idea, we were stuck at 24.
A single nanosecond of time produces a 20 second video. Again to give you an idea, if this video were to film a bullet fired into water it would last three years.
It is currently impossible to record light directly: this is why the camera creates this impressive number of frames, which are then put together. “Nothing in the universe today seems faster than this camera,” says Andrea Velten, a researcher involved in the project. Much emphasis, too much. But he can be really proud of it.
