Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
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Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#2Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things:
(1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus?
(2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No competition. No multiple companies trying different ways to integrate this idea into a product. And if this company goes belly-up, then the good ol' patent laws mean that the tech is just gone for more than a decade. Please license this.
P.S. FTA:
> Once images are captured, they can be posted to Facebook and shared via any modern Web browser, including mobile devices such as the iPhone.
Surely there must be a more straightforward, but still understandable to non-techies, way to say "the result is an ordinary image file".
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#3Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…
This technology has been around in research articles for at least 15 years. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=light+field+ph...
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#4Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…
The image quality seems a bit low (low contrast/greyish, lots of grain), but the concept is very cool. I also see lots of artifacts (horizontal lines) in several of the demo images:
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#5Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…
This technology has been around in research articles for at least 15 years. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=light+field+ph...
true, but that's usually the amount of time it takes for many research technologies to come to fruition as products.
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#6The ability to focus afterwards is at the tradeoff of image size and quality, assuming they use a microlens array similar to the study located here: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/. However, this is cleverly marketed towards the social media crowd, which has little use for high resolution photos.
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#7Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…
A. Yes, I'd imagine so, within reason. Makes for a less interesting demo, though - we've seen lots of images with large focal depth, and lots of images with a narrower depth of focus used to call out one thing, but we've never seen snapshots which you can refocus after they are taken.
This is seriously awesome.
B. This tech isn't going anywhere. If the camera succeeds they might license it. If the camera fails they will surely try to license it. Note also that the technique is apparently not wholly new so the key patents are already running down.
And your point about all those design choices that go into the camera cuts both ways. If they license this tech to a consumer electronics company that flubs the execution they will lose money, as the lousy execution will reflect badly on the tech and will prevent it from getting popular sooner. (The sooner every camera buyer wants this tech, the more profits there will be before the patents expire.) In a world consisting mainly of (a) Apple and (b) hardware companies that cannot design software to save their lives, keeping control of your own fate seems wise. The popularity of this technique among the general public will presumably depend crucially on the UI, both when taking the photo and when displaying it. Better to screw that up yourself than outsource the screwing up to someone else. ;)
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
This technology has been around in research articles for at least 15 years. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=light+field+ph...
true, but that's usually the amount of time it takes for many research technologies to come to fruition as products.
Apologies if I wasn't clear, I was referring to the above poster's comment about this technology being patented.
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#9Very nice. But it leaves me wondering about a couple of things: (1) Given the info captured by the camera, can we, without further human input, create an image in which everything is in focus? (2) What the heck are these people thinking? Going into the camera business? That means that, in order to get my hands on this technology, I am stuck with whatever zillions of other design decisions they made. One product. No c…
Re (1), the guy in the video gives a couple demonstrations of focusing everything in an image. It seems reasonable to assume it could be automated, if that's what you're asking.
And for what it's worth, the just-one-design thing has worked out pretty well for Apple.
Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later
#10FYI Ren Ng (the founder of this company) won the 2006 ACM Doctoral Dissertation award for the research that turned into this product:
http://awards.acm.org/doctoral_dissertation/