How It Works
It all sounds a bit magical, but it opens up a lot of questions. How exactly does it work? What are the tradeoffs, and how will these so-called "living photographs" interact with existing viewing and sharing software?
The basic premise of the light-field camera is to gather all data about the visible light in the camera's field of view so that software can manipulate the photo later. While the concept has been used previously to create imagery like the "bullet time" special effects in the Matrix movies, it required a room full of cameras, Ng says, and the power of a supercomputer. With special optics and sensors, Lytro has built the technique into a single, portable device.
"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."
What happens "after the fact" is the big breakthrough: once the light-field data is captured, Lytro's algorithms can do some impressive tricks. First and foremost is the ability to focus on any point the viewer wishes.
"When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus," says Ng. "So if we have the whole light field, what we can do what that physical lens would normally have done, but in computation."
