Camera Lets You Shift Focus After Shooting 155
Zothecula writes "For those of us who grew up with film cameras, even the most basic digital cameras can still seem a little bit magical. The ability to instantly see how your shots turned out, then delete the ones you don't want and manipulate the ones you like, is something we would have killed for. Well, light field cameras could be to today's digital cameras, what digital was to film. Among other things, they allow users to selectively shift focus between various objects in a picture, after it's been taken. While the technology has so far been inaccessible to most of us, that is set to change, with the upcoming release of Lytro's consumer light field camera."
Re:Personally, I'm still waiting for.. (Score:4, Interesting)
From the sound of it, it basically sounds like it captures a picture with a Z-buffer -- that is, they capture spatial information and angular information, and the angular information is then matched up to find corresponding objects to assess depth for refocusing.
One nifty thing about pictures and videos with built-in Z-buffers would be that it'd be really easy to render into them. Heck, you could have a camera with a built-in GPU that could do it in realtime as you're recording. :)
One step beyond the Z-buffer would be to then do a reverse perspective transformation and extract polygonal information from the scene. This would be of particular use in video recording, where people moving allows the camera to see what's behind them, hidden sides of their bodies, etc. Then you could not only refocus your image, but outright move the camera around in the scene. Of course, if we get to that point, then we'll start seeing increasing demand for cameras that always capture 360-degree panoramas. Combine this with built-in GPS and timestamping and auto-networking of images (within whatever privacy constraints are specified by the camera's owners), and the meshes captured from different angles by people who don't even know each other could be merged into a more complete scene. In busy areas, you could have a full 3d recreation of said area at any point in time. :) "Let's do a flyover along this path in Times Square on this date at this time..."