I’ve already written a couple of pretty popular blog entries on the new camera company, Lytro, which is readying a light-field (plenoptic) camera for market. What’s a light-field camera?, you ask. It captures the light rays from all objects in a scene instead of focusing just the rays from a particular plane of focus onto a sensor. As a result, the light-field camera shoots everything in focus and you can set the focus point after the fact. It’s a neat trick though it remains to be seen if a commercial, consumer market exists for such a device. We won’t know until such a camera is offered for sale later this year. Perhaps it will be the “must have” gift of the coming holiday season. Perhaps it’s the next Polavision. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, I’ve signed up for the Lytro mailing list and just got an email with some additional information. First, the initial Lytro plenoptic camera will be a point-and-shoot (as opposed to a dSLR) camera to keep things as simple as possible.
Second, the Lytro plenoptic camera records enough information through one lens to create 3D images and video. Here’s a 3D video from a camera prototype, but you’ll need anaglyph (red/cyan) glasses to watch it in 3D. you kept yours from Avatar, right?
My two previous EDA360 Insider blogs about Lytro:
Lytro’s new camera will let you adjust focus point of an image long after taking the shot
Lytro CEO talks to CNET about his company’s revolutionary light-field camera
