Someone has built a camera that can record video at an astonishing 2 billion frames per second

Brian Haidet, who works on YouTube under the name of AlphaPhoenix, introduced a camera in his new video that can record the movement of a laser beam at the speed of light. This camera is a more advanced version of his previous design, which could shoot at a rate of one billion frames per second, but comes with a major limitation, which is that it can only record one pixel at a time.

Haidt’s camera is made of simple components: a mirror mounted on a gimbal, two tubes, a simple lens, an optical sensor, and some Python code to synchronize them. When aimed at a laser pointer, the system is capable of recording a beam of light at two billion frames per second. In video, the beam moves smoothly between the mirrors and its speed varies slightly depending on the position of the camera relative to the laser source. “The light moves about 15 centimeters in each frame of this video,” Haidt explains in the video. This beam is moving at the maximum possible speed in the universe. Light in any frame of reference can never travel faster or slower than this speed.

Brian Haidt explains how he put pixels together to create a video that looks like a real movie of light moving. “If we sync all these single-pixel videos together and take a lot of them, we can put them together and play them back together to make something like a real video,” he says.

While it’s theoretically possible to build a camera that can actually shoot video at two billion frames per second, Haidt says it’s not possible to do so with the tools that people usually have. For this reason, his solution is to capture single pixels and then stitch the data together to make the final image. “Any other way to achieve the same result is just a much more expensive way and ultimately doesn’t give us a better result,” he said.