FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Design

Watch a Flying Laser Caught on Video

Scientists captured the flight pattern of a green laser for the first time.

This article was published on January 7, 2015, but we think it still rocks.

While we're used to seeing laser pathways in fog-filled rooms filled with pounding beats and sweaty dancers, the average Joe normally can't see beyond the red dot at the beam's end—until now. Researchers led by Genevieve Gariepy at Heriot-Watt University have developed a sensor that can detect light at 20 billion frames per second, allowing it to track the path of individual photons as they pass by. The process wasn't easy: they had to fire two million green laser pulses into a group of mirrors, gather each photon's individual data points, and then subtract the background noise using a process similar to the camera that can take pictures around corners. While the resulting footage is actually a visualization of the data, it's the closest anybody has ever gotten to seeing an actual laser flight path.

Advertisement

Visit Genevieve Gariepy's website for more of her work.

H/t NewScientist

Related:

Here's A Virtual Bamboo Forest Made of Lasers And Electronic Sound

The World's Fastest Camera Can See Around Corners By Imaging Laser at 15 Billion Frames a Second

Watch A 94-Camera Rig 3D Scan A Human Into Virtual Reality