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Stanford Team Developing Super 3D Camera
Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."
This sounds like sort of a flip of what Adobe announced recently with their "compound eye" camera lens. The benefit with that, I suppose, is that you'd be able to use your existing camera body provided the lens had the right adapter.
It looks like here we've got an image sensor that would allow you to use your own lens, again provided that whatever camera body it found its way into had the right adapter. They also mention that it doesn't necessarily need an objective lens, though, and that's interesting...
The work they've been doing on lightfields is pretty innovative. I first heard about this when Robert Scoble interviewed Marc Levoy and got some cool demos into the video. I've done some lightfield experiments with my trusty Nikon D40, it's interesting to see what new ideas you can come up with for using a camera once you get into it.