Its potential applications are pretty limited at this point, since the current prototype's humongous at one square meter in size. STAMP's creators aim to shrink it down in the future, though that might take time, seeing as it took them three years to get to this point. If and when they do succeed, the camera could be used in medicine to advance ultrasonic therapy and to better understand laser processing in the production of cars and semi-conductors. Wondering how STAMP can take multiple pictures in a very, very short amount of time? According to the team's paper recently published in Nature:

The principle of this method -- 'motion picture femtophotography' -- is all-optical mapping of the target's time-varying spatial profile onto a burst stream of sequentially timed photographs with spatial and temporal dispersion.

If you'd like to savor every technical detail on how STAMP works, though, make sure to head over to the journal for a longer read.

[Image credit: The University of Tokyo]