Andreas Velten, Di Wu, Adrian Jarabo, Belen Masia, Christopher Barsi, Everett Lawson, Chinmaya Joshi, Diego Gutierrez, Moungi G. Bawendi, and Ramesh Raskar. 2012. Relativistic ultrafast rendering using time-of-flight imaging. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Talks (SIGGRAPH ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 41, 1. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2343045.2343100
We capture ultrafast movies of light in motion and synthesize physically valid visualizations. The effective exposure time for each frame is under two picoseconds (ps). Capturing a 2D video with this time resolution is highly challenging, given the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) associated with ultrafast exposures, as well as the absence of 2D cameras that operate at this time scale. We re-purpose modern imaging hardware to record an average of ultrafast repeatable events that are synchronized to a streak tube, and we introduce reconstruction methods to visualize propagation of light pulses through macroscopic scenes.