Typical laser transmitters now consume 100s of femto-Joules to several pico-Joules of energy per bit.

FORBES: Stanford Engineers Unveil An Optical Breakthrough

To see around the corner, we use femto photography to analyze scattered light.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

Unlike conventional cameras, our femto camera captures an image as one thin slice at a time of one-dimensional space using a "streak tube, " a laboratory instrument that is commonly used by chemists to study light passing through chemical samples.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

Just how fast is femto photography?

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

When I gave a TEDGlobal talk on femto photography in June, I began with a reference to Doc Edgerton, a very popular MIT professor of electrical engineering who, in 1964, wowed the world with an image of a bullet in midair, having just passed through an apple.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

We call this new imaging technology femto photography because we capture a segment of the image with a flashlight (in this case, a laser pulse) on for a few millionths of a billionth of a second (or a few femtoseconds) and an exposure time approaching a trillionth of a second.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

Think of it this way: if we took one-thousandth of a second of footage from the femto camera video output and slowed it down to the speed of 30 seconds per frame -- the approximate speed of a standard TV broadcast -- it would take us a lifetime to watch.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners