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Lytro Announces World's First Light Field VR Camera
An anonymous reader writes: VR is easy for video games, but hard for live action: you don't know where the viewer will be in the virtual world, so you can't put the camera in the right place in the real world. Light field cameras are perfect for VR though, because they're essentially holographic, and capture lots of positions at once. And Lytro has announced the first system that's both 'light field' and 'holographic', which changes everything. Wired seems similarly excited.
Not so new.
"Michael Faraday was the first to propose (in an 1846 lecture entitled "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations") that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working for several years. The phrase light field was coined by Alexander Gershun in a classic paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space (1936)."
wikipedia
Oh no... it's the future.
10 years ago I thought light field sensors were the future of photography. But in that 10 years, processors (especially GPUs) and camera sensors have advanced so quickly. It's now a race between light field sensors (which are like recording the information a hologram records), versus simply mounting 2+ cameras which take pictures simultaneously and using image processing algorithms to extract the depth info from those pictures instead of recording it directly.
I've got the first generation Lytro. It was a nifty toy for a while, but ultimately I wasn't happy with the quality of most of the pictures. Except for in bright sunlight they were all pretty grainy and dark. The changing of the focus is neat on some where something is very close and others are very far, but if everything is middle distance to far, it's not interesting.
It was very hard to come up with good lightfield images that matched the demo ones on their website.
Maybe I should take it out again, take a break from walking around with my SLR for a weekend or two, see what I get.