Thursday, July 28, 2011

Light Field capture, a new kind of photography

Have been reading about light field capture, which has poked into the news as a couple of products make it to market. A German company called __ has had something available for a little while, and Popular Mechanics just reported on a CA firm called Lytra. (Thanks James!)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/the-lytro-light-field-camera-how-it-works?src=rss

The most commonly marketed application at this point is "focus after capture." Take a meta-picture from which a certain selection of focus can be made after-the-fact. Computational photography.

What I wonder, is can this technology (which is more a cluster of methods than a tried-and-true science at this point) be combined into a time-of-flight (ToF) Camera? Such speculation is for another post.....