- Ever wish you could see through walls?
Well, now you can.
(upbeat electronic music)
The first cameras fundamentally
changed the way we view the world.
In fact, it helped settle an age-old debate,
do all four horse's hooves come
off the ground when it's in a trot?
Well, the answer, as it turns out, is yes.
The unknowable became knowable thanks to cameras.
Now we're in the digital age and we're just beginning
to learn the possibilities of digital cameras.
For example, there's a company called Lytro
that makes a camera that uses light-field capture.
What does that mean?
Well, your typical digital camera
takes light from one direction,
and it hits an image sensor, and that's that.
But the Lytro measures all the light within a scene,
up to 11 million rays of light,
then it processes that information in a computer.
So what's so good about that?
It means that you can change the focus of your picture
after you've taken the photograph.
You can even view this in 3D.
But what about those of us who, no matter what we try,
end up with a blurry photo every time we hit the shutter?
Well, there are some researchers at MIT
who are working on some algorithms that can actually
decode an image and make a blurry one crisp clear.
It's called deconvolution.
Now, this algorithm inverts motion blur
so that it takes whatever was blurry
and figures out what should have been there
so that you get a perfect shot every time.
So deconvolution, light field capture,
really what we're talking about here
is grabbing lots more information
that's out there than we ever could before,
and then calculating in a way that's useful.
And you ain't seen nothing yet.
There are people working on amazing applications
for digital cameras that most of us have never dreamed of.
All right, check this out.
Ramesh Raskar of MIT created a super
slow-motion camera with 500 sensors
that can trigger at one trillionth of a second.
This means this camera can track the movement of photons.
This is the speed of light we're talking about,
The fastest stuff in the universe,
and this camera can track it.
What can you use it for besides maybe making
an instant replay moment stretch into an eternity?
How about actually using it to see around corners?
How?
Imagine a person is in a room and the camera outside
takes a picture of the room's half open door.
The light bounces off the door,
scattering in all directions, and some of that light
bounces off the person in the room.
Some of that light bounces back off
of the door and then returns to the camera.
The key is that all these photons return
at a slightly different time, the difference in time
in the photons' arrival can be analyzed to create
an image of what was in the other room.
This approach could be applied to medical technology
as a less invasive way of seeing
what's going on inside the human body.
It'd be really useful for things like cardiograms
or even the dreaded colonoscopy.
It could also be very useful in emergency situations
for searching for survivors in a collapsed
or burning building, and we could even mount
these cameras on cars that could trigger a braking system
if it detected that another car
is about to come barreling around a corner.
Cameras have changed the way we understand our world
and ourselves, and this coming generation
of camera technology is going to give us
what amounts to be extrasensory perception.
We're gonna have access to data we didn't even know existed.
So imagine watching the formation of a rainbow
or the moment that light defracts when it hits water,
or even the formation of a supernova,
and maybe, just maybe, we'll finally develop technology
that can allow me to take a decent driver's license photo.
All right, I've got a question for you.
What do you think is more important,
having a camera that has all of these
amazing capabilities, or your sense of privacy?
Leave us a comment and tell us what you think,
and while you're at it, like this video
if you enjoyed it, and subscribe to our channel
because we've got a lot more cool videos
coming up in the future.
(ambient electronic music)