The Digester

DIY Two-Billion-FPS Camera Captures Laser Beam Moving Through a Garage

Mar 3rd 2026

Brian Haidet of AlphaPhoenix built a homemade camera that records light at 2 billion frames per second and captured a laser beam crossing his garage, but the system records only one pixel at a time and relies on synchronized tiling to create usable footage.

  • Brian Haidet of the AlphaPhoenix YouTube channel recorded a laser beam at 2 billion frames per second.
  • Haidet has a PhD in Materials Science and built the camera by iterating on a previous 1 billion FPS design over about 12 months.
  • The system captures only a single 1x1 pixel per frame, so Haidet scans and tiles many synchronized captures to reconstruct a moving image.
  • At 2 billion FPS light travels roughly 15 centimeters, or about six inches, between each recorded frame.
  • The hardware is simple and homemade, consisting of one mirror, one lens, two tubes, a cable, an unusual flash bulb, and a few hundred lines of Python.
  • The final video shows light propagation but is a reconstructed representation because of the single-pixel acquisition method.

Sources

petapixel.com