Has light field technology ushered in a new era of photography?

VIDEO 16 min. 56 sec. This TED Talk by Ren Ng, the founder and CEO of Lytro, was given approximately a month after Lytro started shipping its camera to consumers. He talks about the development of the light field camera in both the lab at Stanford and as an entrepreneur, and the possibilities the light field camera brings to picture story-telling, enticing the viewer to click on parts of a picture to explore further, or inviting one to see more detail.

Lytro founder Ren Ng’s TED Talk harkens back to Wetzstein’s mention of 3-D uses of light field technology.

If you watched the above video to the end, you learned that with a 3-D projector and 3-D glasses, the light field images are inherently 3 dimensional, and that 2-D images can be manipulated as in a hologram.

Three-dimensional renderings were also discussed earlier in Gordon Wetzstein’s earlier video talk. At one point, Wetzstein mentioned the inconvenience of wearing 3-D glasses, while watching, for example, 3-D TV, and the possible application of compensating for visual aberrations particular to individual viewers with future computational photographic solutions based on light field technology.

Light field technology was mentioned by Wetzstein as applicable to medical need for imaging within the body, as an improvement of existing technology.

The possibility of utilizing light field technology for virtual and augmented reality applications now seems on the forefront of technology, further expanding the potential of this new technology.

Back to 2007, if you would like to see how Adobe introduced their research on light field computational photography, with one lens, not intending to go into the hardware business, see the next page.