[ericol]

As cool a project this is, thought, I don't see - I reckon this could be my fault - how is this different from a "let's take a bunch of high speed synchronized pictures with a strobe".

"bullet time" was, at least, animated. I also understand that it is very possible that you can do that (just that are not showing it).

[revalo]

My bad, maybe I should take more writing classes.

I guess what's different here is we're not using a $300 DSLR. We're using a $5 raspberry pi camera.

If we did the "let's take a bunch of high speed synchronized pictures with a strobe" on the cheap cameras, we'd see a single row of pixels worth of image, if we're lucky because of rolling shutter.

What we've done here is hack together some software to get a global shutter on these cheap cameras. Now that we can take pretty high speed pictures with $5, we scaled it up to get 16 cameras and took 16 angles of a bullet going though an apple, all at once. The "bullet time" examples in the repo are not computer graphics, they are 16 individual images played one after another.

[burningion]

This project is great! It's really exciting work, and I love that you open sourced it!

I think you're getting so many confused people because of your new domain expertise in playing with strobes for the class.

Most people are assuming you're synchronizing a bunch of cameras at very low latency and high speeds with a long lived light, but it appears you're using a dark room with a strong, short strobe as a shutter instead.

The real hack (if I understand correctly) is using your global shutter to take in a consistent point in time.

Maybe adding a non-global shutter image to compare and contrast the value of that hack would work in conveying how it works? Maybe a video too? In infrared?

These two changes can really help quickly communicate the work you're doing and get more people interested.

Either way, great work, excited to see what else you make!

[ericol]

Hi, sorry I didn't want to come out as obnoxious; I was on my way out, and wrote in a hurry. I ended up sounding like an idiot anyway.

I think that your project is an incredible one. Any project that goes "We did this with $5 instead of $5000" is totally worth it, from whatever point of view you want to see it.

There's an interesting and IMO relevant trend I see in technology these days, where coupling open technologies with smart people like you ends up allowing what's considered "extreme high tech" to be available to the "normal" people.

I just wanted to point out that may be you're not showing up the full capabilities of what you did.

I take it that if the strobe light is fast enough, you could get the different cameras to fecth frames from different flashes, thus creating a "real" bullet time sequence?