light field photography

Lytro adds more ways to interact with its living pictures

Photos taken with Lytro's light field camera (aka living pictures) were already more interactive than a regular snapshot, letting you endlessly refocus the images by clicking on different parts of them. An upcoming software update takes the interactivity up a notch, letting you change the perspective of your shots, too.

The free Lytro Desktop software update, which rolls out December 4, adds this Perspective Shift feature, enabling Lytro users to slightly change the point of view of a living picture by clicking and dragging it in any direction.

For example, click and hold on the picture at the top … Read more

Start-up Lytro tries refocusing camera industry

A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.

The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.

Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his … Read more

Pelican shows slim phone-camera prototype

In academic circles, light-field photography is nothing new. Now, though, a start-up called Pelican Imaging has unveiled a prototype of the technology geared to improve mobile-phone cameras.

Light-field photography--and the related concept of a plenoptic camera--is a complicated concept involving an array of small images rather than one large one. Essential to the process is computational image processing that can extract an actual photograph from the jumble of raw data.

And not just any image, but several images. Light-field photography captures enough data that a person can adjust focus after the shot has been taken and perform actions such … Read more