Photo Gallery When One Lens Becomes Hundreds
Since photography was invented in the 1830s, conventional cameras have projected an image through a single lens onto a two-dimensional surface. Since all the light passes through the same lens, information regarding three-dimensional depth is lost.
Discontent with the rigidity of a camera's one-eyed gaze is nearly as old as photography itself. In 1908, Nobel Prize-winning French physicist Gabriel Lippmann came up with "photographies intégrales," or integral photography, a technique designed to create comprehensive, integrated photographs with the aid of light fields.
New light-field cameras are combining Lippmann's idea with computers, merging optics and electronics. These cameras consist of not one lens, but hundreds -- just like many insects' eyes. What's more, since each of these tiny lenses represents a slightly different perspective, a computer can generate 3-D images out of those differences at a later point or adjust the image's focus as desired.
Such technology has been integrated into products like the light-field camera of the California-based start-up Lytro. Though it seems highly unlikely that such a device will revolutionize photography, the technology behind the Lytro camera could profoundly impact it.
Applications for the technology are also being found in the industrial, automotive and electronics field. For example, they could allow for cell-phone cameras -- like the one being used here by US actor Brad Pitt -- to become much thinner. German researchers have also reversed the technology, making these insect-eyed cameras into miniature projectors.
