Michael Faraday proposed the idea of a function describing the amount of light fairing through every point in space in his 1846 paper "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations." Alexander Gershun coined the phrase Light Field, in his paper on radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space in 1936. Building on the shoulders of these giants, light-field photography was born. The concept is a photograph that takes in all the light in a scene which could be focused anywhere in the image at a later date. Adobe and Pelican Imaging dabbled with the concept, but did not take it to commercial use.
A company in Mountain View, California, named Lytro. is set to release the first widely available light-field camera by the end of the year. Price is unknown, but do not expect it to be a cheap stocking stuffer. Creator Ren Ng spoke about how this technique was done before, "Light field photography was once only possible with 100 cameras tethered to a supercomputer in a lab." The Lytro camera is a single portable device.
Ren Ng continued, "Regular photographs just don't tell the whole story. If you think about all the light that enters that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light-field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact."
The Lytro camera does away with lenses. Quality of conventional photography, and even digital, depended heavily on the quality of the lens. The lens is used to fix the focus on the wherever needed. The Lytro throws that need right out of the window. However, to make fisheye or other distorted effects would have to be done digitally.
The Lytro cannot only take 2D pictures but also 3D. Since light-field captures all the image's data, algorithms can be allied to give the three-dimensional effect. Ren Ng explained, "It goes beyond the 3D you see in the movies because we can also change the perspective in the scene. It's what would happen if you were standing at that scene, and you were kind of moving your head from side to side."
The new camera performs well in low-light conditions. Since it can take in all the light in its view, it can handle conditions with 16 times less light than conventional cameras. Ren Ng again, "For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field—totally impossible with a conventional camera."
One downside to the tech is the actual quality of the image. To make the technology work, Lytro's image quality was downgraded to make the optics less complex and affordable. The company said the Lytro camera is not meant to compete with high-resolution professional cameras, but instead being targeted for the point-and-shoot crowd and web-sharing. Ren Ng defended the choice, "The resolution issue from the research side of things was one of the early big breakthoughs at the company. The thing about resolution, by the time people share pictures online, you're throwing away 90 to 95 percent of those pixels. And the vast majority of picture use today goes through the Web."
Shaped unlike most cameras the Lytro light-field camera will soon demonstrate the defacto technology of photography's future.
Eavesdropper
Pictures and video via Lytro