

Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera (2005) - fgeorgy
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

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deutronium
This is rather fascinating too -
[http://cameramaker.se/microlenses.htm](http://cameramaker.se/microlenses.htm)
on how a light field array can be made.

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joefkelley
Also check out Lytro, the company created based on this technology. They've
got some pretty impressive demos on their website:
[https://pictures.lytro.com/](https://pictures.lytro.com/)

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bunderbunder
I have an original Lytro camera.

I had a whole lot of fun with it at first, but it's fallen into disuse. The
live refocusing is a fun trick, but in practice what the camera is really
doing is taking ~10 simultaneous pictures with different focal lengths, and
letting you choose among them after the fact when you're using their special
app.

The novelty of this trick wears off quickly. In practice, I know what I want
to focus on at the point when I'm taking the picture in the vast majority of
circumstances, and if I want to keep my options open I can bracket. In those
situations, using 90% of the sensor's pixels to record versions of the image
using focal lengths I don't care about just means I'm getting a 1 megapixel
image when I could have had 10.

Where I had high hopes was that this would be great for macrophotography,
where focus is a lot harder to get right. Unfortunately it's really difficult
to convince the camera to focus in close enough to capture the subject. I'm
not sure if this is a physical limitation of the hardware or if it's a
firmware issue, but either way it was disappointing.

So all that negative nellying aside, one spot where I think this technology
could be really neat is in computer vision for robotics. I'm guessing that
using a plenoptic camera instead of a stereoscopic pair of cameras for vision
would enable capture of better 3D information, or at least 3D information with
different characteristics that might be more useful in some circumstances.

