Ultrafast camera

Article 1: Ultrafast camera captures sonic booms of light for first time.

By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor

Just as aircraft flying at supersonic speeds create cone-shaped sonic booms, pulses of light can leave behind cone-shaped wakes of light. Now, a superfast camera has captured the first-ever video of these events.

The new technology used to make this discovery could one day allow scientists to help watch neurons fire and image live activity in the brain, researchers say. [Spooky! Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena] 

Science behind the tech

When an object moves through air, it propels the air in front of it away, creating pressure waves that move at the speed of sound in all directions. If the object is moving at speeds equal to or greater than sound, it outruns those pressure waves. As a result, the pressure waves from these speeding objects pile up on top of each other to create shock waves known as sonic booms, which are akin to claps of thunder.

Sonic booms are confined to conical regions known as "Mach cones" that extend primarily to the rear of supersonic objects. Similar events include the V-shaped bow waves that a boat can generate when traveling faster than the waves it pushes out of its way move across the water.

Previous research suggested that light can generate conical wakes similar to sonic booms. Now, for the first time, scientists have imaged these elusive "photonic Mach cones."

Light travels at a speed of about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) when moving through vacuum. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. However, light can travel more slowly than its top speed — for instance, light moves through glass at speeds of about 60 percent of its maximum. Indeed, prior experiments have slowed light down more than a million-fold.

The fact that light can travel faster in one material than in another helped scientists to generate photonic Mach cones. First,study lead author Jinyang Liang, an optical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues designed a narrow tunnel filled with dry ice fog. This tunnel was sandwiched between plates made of a mixture of silicone rubber and aluminum oxide powder. 

Then, the researchers fired pulses of green laser light — each lasting only 7 picoseconds (trillionths of a second) — down the tunnel. These pulses could scatter off the specks of dry ice within the tunnel, generating light waves that could enter the surrounding plates.

The green light that the scientists used traveled faster inside the tunnel than it did in the plates. As such, as a laser pulse moved down the tunnel, it left a cone of slower-moving overlapping light waves behind it within the plates.

Streak camera

To capture video of these elusive light-scattering events, the researchers developed a "streak camera" that could capture images at speeds of 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure. This new camera captured three different views of the phenomenon: one that acquired a direct image of the scene, and two that recorded temporal information of the events so that the scientists could reconstruct what happened frame by frame. Essentially, they "put different bar codes on each individual image, so that even if during the data acquisition they are all mixed together, we can sort them out," Liang said in an interview.

There are other imaging systems that can capture ultrafast events, but these systems usually need to record hundreds or thousands of exposures of such phenomena before they can see them. In contrast, the new system can record ultrafast events with just a single exposure. This lends itself to recording complex, unpredictable events that may not repeat themselves in precisely the same manner each time they happen, as was the case with the photonic Mach cones that Liang and his colleagues recorded. In that case, the tiny specks that scattered light moved around randomly.

The researchers said their new technique could prove useful in recording ultrafast events in complex biomedical contexts such as living tissues or flowing blood. "Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons fire and image live traffic in the brain," Liang told Live Science. "We hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how the brain works."

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 20 in the journal Science Advances.

Article 2: Futurs Cameras.

by Kyle Schurman

Digital cameras are always changing, adding new features and improving old ones. The technologies appearing in today's cameras were initially discovered several years ago, perhaps even for a different purpose, before becoming part of the mainstream camera world.

Here are some of the most interesting and promising changes coming to digital camera technology in the near future.

1

Goodbye, Shutter Button

Cameras of the future may no longer require a shutter button. Instead, photographers could wink or use a voice command to tell the camera to record a photo. In the case of a wink, the camera probably would be built into a person's glasses, or another everyday item. With the camera built into a pair of glasses, aiming the camera would be easy, too.

This type of camera potentially could work in a manner similar to a hands-free cell phone, where you can issue commands without the need to push a button.

2

Redefining "Ultra Compact"

An ultra compact camera generally is defined as a camera that measures 1 inch or less in thickness. Such small cameras are great because they easily fit in a pants pocket or a purse.

The camera of the future could redefine "ultra compact," though, creating cameras that could be 0.5 inches in thickness and maybe with smaller dimensions than today's cameras.

This prediction makes some sense, as digital cameras from a decade ago were much larger than today's small models, and the high-tech components inside digital cameras continue to shrink. As more cameras incorporate touch screens for operating the camera, the camera's size could be determined by the size of its display screen, eliminating all other controls and buttons, much like a smartphone.

3

"Smell-graphy"

Photography is a visual medium, but the camera of the future may add the sense of smell to photographs.

Adding the ability to stimulate senses other than vision to photographs would be an interesting idea. For example, a photographer could command the camera to record the smell of the scene, embedding it with the visual image that it captured. The ability to add smells to photographs would need to be optional, though ... adding smells to a photograph of food or a field of flowers would be great, but adding smells to photographs of the monkey house at the zoo might not be desirable.

4

Unlimited Battery Power

Today's rechargeable batteries in digital cameras are as powerful as they've ever been, allowing at least a few hundred photographs per charge. However, what if you could charge the camera automatically as you're using it, without the need to be plugged into an electrical outlet?

The camera of the future could incorporate some sort of solar energy cell, allowing the battery to either operate only from solar power or allowing it to charge the battery using the solar cell.

Some questions would have to be answered first, such as how much the solar cell would add to the size of the camera. Still, though, it would be nice to have a built-in solution to prevent the problem of a dead battery.

5

Dot Sight Camera

Olympus

Olympus' effort at setting its ultra-zoom SP-100 camera apart involves giving this model a futuristic Dot Sight mechanism that will help you track far-off subjects while the camera's powerful 50X optical zoom is fully engaged. Most photographers who have made use of cameras with long zoom lenses have experienced the problem of having a subject move out of the frame while shooting over a long distance with the zoom in use.

The Dot Sight is built into the popup flash unit and gives the SP-100 a unique feature. You certainly won't find this type of feature on any other consumer-level camera.

Light Field Recording

Lytro

Lytro cameras have been employing light field technology for a few years, but this idea may become a bigger part of general photography soon. Light field photography involves recording the photo and then determining which portion of the photo you want to have in focus later. 

7

No Light Required

Cameras that excel in low light -- or no light -- photography are on the way. The ISO setting in a digital camera determines the sensitivity to light for the image sensor, and a setting of 51,200 is a common maximum ISO setting for today's DSLR cameras.

But Canon has unveiled a new camera, the ME20F-SH, that would have a maximum ISO of 4 million, which effectively would allow the camera to work in the dark. Expect more cameras in the future that can match this model's low light performance level ... and exceed it.

Resume :

Photography is constantly growing thanks to several technical and technological innovations. The photo is very used in our daily life but also in multiple fields such as aerospace for exemple. 

But the first article shows us that photography is going to develop in other fields such as medicine. Some important advances may be possible through this, such as studying the neural network and understanding how the brain works.

These innovations are possible thanks to daily technical improvements as presented in Article Two.

I think that photography and the camera has an important future in all areas but we need to be able to control the catch too high for everyone to enjoy.