The first experiment will be to create a polar camera. The creation of the polar camera came due to the high cost of high speed cameras. Most high speed cameras today, such as the Phantom, cost up to and over $100000. Further to cost, I have always wanted an affordable camera that also has a high frame rate and decent quality.

The polar camera deviates from the standard camera that shines light onto a rectangular sensor and refreshes the sensor rapidly to capture high FPS video. The polar camera functions by rotating a linear sensor and capturing the projected light field at certain intervals.

The advantages this brings to high speed video comes primarily from the much reduced cost of the product, however it should also solve problems that have plagued the high speed industry for years. Linear sensors have much larger pixels, thus having the ability to capture light much quicker and efficiently. This allows the camera operating at high speed to no longer require intense lights to illuminate the field. This makes extremely high speed videos much more pleasant to watch. However we need to figure out though whether this increase in active area combined with the far more rapid, multiple exposures needed to obtain just a single image work together.

Furthermore the camera is able to operate at much higher frame rates, as the frame rate is limited by the rotation of the sensor, not by its refresh rate (linear sensors refresh rate is no trouble e.g. up to 53k lines/sec for an el-cheapo TSL1401CL sensor at 128 pixels.

As we do not live in a perfect world, there are also disadvantages. Circular photos are produced as opposed to the standard rectangular photos. This however can be remedied by cropping a large circular photo into a rectangle. Furthermore, due to the mechanical qualities of this camera, there is an aspect of wear and tear in the spinning parts.

A detailed diagram of how this will work will be up soon.