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This has gotta be bullshit, or at least a conceptual patent (which is another word for bullshit), right?

From everything I know about optics -- and I teach college physics, so I'm not clueless -- if you put a video screen on the surface of the eyeball all you'll see is a colored blur over your whole field of vision. What matters is not the location of the light source on your cornea, but the *direction* it's coming from: any workable video screen would need to work kinda like a phased-array radar, but a million times smaller. Or something like the Lytro light field camera in reverse.

But while I can think of ways in which such a thing *could* work, with current technology this is utterly impossible. Anybody better-informed than me care to weigh in?

The first generation is now $150.

A 40 megaray light sensor may be interesting in such applications?
http://www.lytro.com/
Recording more than just intensity per pixel...

I was considering getting the first version of their camera, but they use a proprietary image format for the original data and requests to open it are unanswered so far. Not even a SDK is provided to access the original data even though it was promised. Kind of disappointing and enough reason for me not to buy.

I was considering getting the first version of their camera, but they use a proprietary image format for the original data and requests to open it are unanswered so far. Not even a SDK is provided to access the original data even though it was promised. Kind of disappointing and enough reason for me not to buy.

Cannot wait to see what is possible when they do that with these cameras: https://www.lytro.com/camera/

Isn't this what Lytro has been doing for a while now?

Mostly they show up when in creative mode because you can have areas of the scene that can't be pulled into focus, and when shooting dirty glass. I've been really happy with the picture quality in general though, and am sure that improvements in the software/algorithms will help a lot.
https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544030

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544050

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/531986

Also this article makes for an interesting read.
http://eclecti.cc/computervision/reverse-engineering-the-lytro-lfp-file-format

Mostly they show up when in creative mode because you can have areas of the scene that can't be pulled into focus, and when shooting dirty glass. I've been really happy with the picture quality in general though, and am sure that improvements in the software/algorithms will help a lot.
https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544030

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544050

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/531986

Also this article makes for an interesting read.
http://eclecti.cc/computervision/reverse-engineering-the-lytro-lfp-file-format

Mostly they show up when in creative mode because you can have areas of the scene that can't be pulled into focus, and when shooting dirty glass. I've been really happy with the picture quality in general though, and am sure that improvements in the software/algorithms will help a lot.
https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544030

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/544050

https://pictures.lytro.com/tophertuttle/pictures/531986

Also this article makes for an interesting read.
http://eclecti.cc/computervision/reverse-engineering-the-lytro-lfp-file-format

Lytro has a Flash program which will work on their images. Here's a good example. This shows a girl blowing big bubbles, and you can see the background through the bubbles.

Lytro is doing more than an image warp, but less than multiple points of view, as you can see in this image. Click and drag on the image, and the point of view changes slightly. Note where the nearby orange toy occludes the car in the background, and see slightly more or less of the car appear. That looks correct. But look at the background through the bubbles. The background behind the bubbles doesn't change when you change the psuedo-POV. So they don't really have a stereoscopic view. Here's one with a row of glasses which shows the same problem.

This is more like the kind of fake 3D added to movies in postprocessing. They're converting the image to layers and moving the layers relative to each other. To pull this off, the nearer layers have to be shown slightly larger than they really are. One you notice this, it's kind of creepy. It also fails for images with a range of depth but which don't layer well. This plant image shows that. The near part of the plant is being treated as a single layer and warped, which looks wrong.

It's a useful tool for some special effects, perhaps, but not a breakthrough.

Lytro has a Flash program which will work on their images. Here's a good example. This shows a girl blowing big bubbles, and you can see the background through the bubbles.

Lytro is doing more than an image warp, but less than multiple points of view, as you can see in this image. Click and drag on the image, and the point of view changes slightly. Note where the nearby orange toy occludes the car in the background, and see slightly more or less of the car appear. That looks correct. But look at the background through the bubbles. The background behind the bubbles doesn't change when you change the psuedo-POV. So they don't really have a stereoscopic view. Here's one with a row of glasses which shows the same problem.

This is more like the kind of fake 3D added to movies in postprocessing. They're converting the image to layers and moving the layers relative to each other. To pull this off, the nearer layers have to be shown slightly larger than they really are. One you notice this, it's kind of creepy. It also fails for images with a range of depth but which don't layer well. This plant image shows that. The near part of the plant is being treated as a single layer and warped, which looks wrong.

It's a useful tool for some special effects, perhaps, but not a breakthrough.

Lytro has a Flash program which will work on their images. Here's a good example. This shows a girl blowing big bubbles, and you can see the background through the bubbles.

Lytro is doing more than an image warp, but less than multiple points of view, as you can see in this image. Click and drag on the image, and the point of view changes slightly. Note where the nearby orange toy occludes the car in the background, and see slightly more or less of the car appear. That looks correct. But look at the background through the bubbles. The background behind the bubbles doesn't change when you change the psuedo-POV. So they don't really have a stereoscopic view. Here's one with a row of glasses which shows the same problem.

This is more like the kind of fake 3D added to movies in postprocessing. They're converting the image to layers and moving the layers relative to each other. To pull this off, the nearer layers have to be shown slightly larger than they really are. One you notice this, it's kind of creepy. It also fails for images with a range of depth but which don't layer well. This plant image shows that. The near part of the plant is being treated as a single layer and warped, which looks wrong.

It's a useful tool for some special effects, perhaps, but not a breakthrough.

It's actually better than that. There are quite a few technologies which will interpolate the "in between" views from several cameras (google "Novel View Synthesis"). Don't forget that lightfield capture technologies like the Lytro Camera also exist.

I've seen projection based glasses free 3D systems that are also quite impressive, such as Holografika.

I really do wish this 3D Hate would end...

From least to most expensive, here are some mid budget items that would get me excited:
In the $200 range, and because I enjoy programming:

• - A kinect with either the Microsoft API
• - A primesense 3D sensor with the OpenNI API

For super extra bonus fun, integrate the sensor with the robot operating system so that you can use their cool 3D visualization tools.

Another sweet toy, slightly more expensive at $400, is the Lytro camera.

My final toy choice would be a very open 3D printing platform, like the 3rd generation Solidoodle, which at $799 is actually only accepting pre-orders now.

If I had all that stuff, and had enough time to play with it, I'd be pretty happy.

You can also go the other way with a light field: I saw an amazing talk on the Lytro light field camera a few months ago. Basically, they have one normal CCD with an array of microlenses in front of it, so you get a 2D array of smaller normal 2D images that are effectively from slightly different angles which can later be combined in software similar to adjusting the settings on a regular camera... but after taking the photo. I didn't think the idea could be easily adapted to a display, so it's really cool they managed to do this.

Isn't this the Lytro camera concept?

Google Street View pictures are not particularly comparable to Lytro pictures, GSV uses panoramic methods to grab the entire scene, whereas Lytro uses multiple sensors to grab everything in front of the camera, and sort the focus out later. The Lytro site has plenty of examples in their gallery, this is a particularly good one. I could not, however, find a picture with a fire hydrant and a building on their site.

I agree with KingMotley that cinematography will adapt, but I think the really exciting application would be communication. Imagine a wall-sized display using this display technology but where every tenth pixel is a lens feeding data into a light field camera. You could virtually join your living room or office with someone's on the other side of the world (kinda like the floor to ceiling 3D display on the TNG Enterprise). Speaking as someone who lives far away from many of my loved ones, I think that would be awesome.

Heck you could even possibly replace the lenses themselves with a modified display that uses a camera and alters the image to your prescription.

Nope, sorry, optics don't work like that. At least not with the kinds of displays we have now (I suppose we might eventually have some sort of light-field display, to be used with a light field camera, that could recreate all of the incoming rays of light, rather than one or several flat images).

However an uncorrected conventional display may work fine for nearsighted people simply because it would be close to their eye.

Sure, the resolution is rather limited by today's standards, but you have the option of bringing many individual things into focus, or put everything but one thing in focus, or vice-versa. It's a new tech, but it's awesome to not have to worry about focus ever again.

https://www.lytro.com/camera
https://www.lytro.com/science_inside

I have one and it is quite a fun thing to behold. It has limitations, however. But those aren't so bad, really.

Sure, the resolution is rather limited by today's standards, but you have the option of bringing many individual things into focus, or put everything but one thing in focus, or vice-versa. It's a new tech, but it's awesome to not have to worry about focus ever again.

https://www.lytro.com/camera
https://www.lytro.com/science_inside

I have one and it is quite a fun thing to behold. It has limitations, however. But those aren't so bad, really.

http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery

...which explains the tech and its application in wonderful detail. http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf

The price will determine its sucess. Consumers don't care about the tech aspect, only the price, convenience and how they are introduced to the idea.

That said, the technology is similar to insect compound eyes. It uses multiple tiny lenses directly in front of the sensor to create many tiny copies of the main image. It then uses software to determine the vectors of the light hitting it to correct lens aberration, defocus, noise, and uses parallax to determine depth (it has 3D capability). Because it captures more light, it also requires a much shorter shutter time, by using a much greater aperture, without the blurriness.

The downside: it uses many pixels on the sensor to determine a single pixel in the final image. Each microlens becomes a single pixel.

The dissertation by the CEO is not too difficult to follow. I would recommend anyone who likes CS and Photography to read it on the lytro website: http://www.lytro.com/science_inside (see page 4)

If you examine their demo file, you'll find the 5 static JPEGs inside.

http://cdn01.lytro.com/media/lytro/lyt-37/lyt-37.lfp

What exactly was the point of that "demo"?