Making the invisible visible

That’s exactly what researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to do thanks to a new system that amplifies tiny motions captured pixel by pixel.

In the department of computer science, Neal Wadhwa, a graduate student in applied mathematics and computer science, is running an experiment with a wine glass. Vibrations produced by a speaker in the room make the glass vibrate – but this not visible to the naked eye.

Using what they call a “motion microscope”, the researchers see the wine glass in a whole new light. A laptop monitor displays a video of the glass as seen through the microscope.

“These are things that people have never seen before and we are making them visible. The motion microscope is a way to visualize small motions that are seemingly invisible to the naked eye in videos,” says Wadhwa.

A video is fed into a computer running an innovative software that tracks tiny changes. Those minute changes are then amplified and superimposed on to the o