MIT's Camera Captures Light Moving at 1 Trillion FPS

Imagine a camera so impossibly fast that it makes a speeding bullet look frozen in time. MIT researchers built exactly that—an imaging system that captures one trillion frames per second. At that speed, you can actually watch light move.

To put this in perspective: if you filmed a bullet traveling through water at this frame rate, the resulting video would take three years to watch. That's not a typo. Light itself—the fastest thing in the universe—becomes visible in slow motion.

Watching Photons Race Through a Bottle

In their demonstration video, MIT's team filmed light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap, and reflecting back to the bottom. The entire journey takes about a nanosecond in real time. But captured at a trillion frames per second, you can watch every photon's path like watching ripples spread across a pond.

As researcher Andreas Velten put it: "There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera."

How Do You Film Something That Fast?

Here's the catch: this isn't really a traditional camera. You can't just point it at something and hit record. The system uses a clever trick called femto-photography, which works more like building a flipbook than shooting a video.

The technique requires:

• Repeating the same event millions of times (like firing a laser pulse)
• Capturing a tiny slice of time with each repetition
• Carefully scanning different viewpoints and moments
• Reconstructing all those slices into a coherent "movie"

Each individual frame captures just two trillionths of a second. The final visualization plays at about half a trillion frames per second—still absurdly fast, but slow enough that our brains can process what we're seeing.

Why Build Something This Extreme?

Beyond the pure "because we can" factor, femto-photography has practical applications. Understanding how light scatters and travels through materials could revolutionize medical imaging, helping doctors see inside the body in entirely new ways. It could improve fiber-optic communications, advance computer vision systems, and help scientists study ultrafast physical phenomena.

The project emerged from MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture group, led by Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar and postdoc Andreas Velten. They unveiled it in December 2011 at both the Optical Society's Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging conference and at SIGGRAPH.

Light travels roughly 300,000 kilometers per second—fast enough to circle Earth seven and a half times in one second. Yet this camera makes it look like honey dripping from a spoon. It's a reminder that no matter how fast something seems, there's always a way to break it down, slow it down, and truly see what's happening.