Markets in Everything: "Light Field Camera" Allows You To Focus Selectively AFTER You Take a Picture

Geeks at Large Blog -- "Lytro is the world’s first light field camera. Light field is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. Light field contains a lot more information than traditional light captured by regular cameras, especially pertaining to the placement of objects emitting that light and their distance from the camera. 

Traditional cameras capture light and color but light field cameras also captures vector direction of the rays of light. This extra bit of information, combined with the special light field sensor and the powerful software, let’s the camera know the position of the objects in the frame, which is what lets it perform its magic trick, focus selectively on objects AFTER they are captured by the camera. 

If you’re wondering how many megapixels can that sensor capture, then the answer is none. The Lytro camera chooses to measure rays of light instead, 11 million of them to be precise. The images captured by the camera are in a proprietary format and can be selectively zoomed in on the camera or the Mac-only desktop software that it comes with. Images can be converted to other formats but then they will obviously lose their focus changing ability.

The Lytro light field camera will go on sale early 2012 and will cost $399 for the 8GB model that can store up to 350 images and $499 for the 16GB model that stores up to 750 images."

MP: You can go here to Lytro's "living picture gallery" and see how the amazing selective focusing works - that was how I was able to create the images above.

Related: See stories in today's SF Chronicle and Wash Post.