PopTech : Blog : Shoot now, focus later: the new Lytro camera

Shoot now, focus later: the new Lytro camera

Kiley Lambert ( Bio / Posts ) | Monday, June 27, 2011 UTC

Ten-thumbed amateur photographers (and A/V geeks of all stripes) take heart! Lytro has developed a new kind of camera that uses light field photography to create photographs that can be focused after you take the shot (click on the above photograph to see how it works).

The light field is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras can not record the light field. The Lytro camera substitutes powerful software for many of the internal parts of regular cameras, and sophisticated algorithms transform the light field into what Lytro calls "living pictures."

The technology for light field photography has been around for a while, but the breakthrough is Lytro's light field sensor which essentially packs a multi-lens array into a portable, point-and-shoot body through the replacement of hardware with software that allows the user to manipulate the focus after the shot has been taken.

Lytro company founder Ren Ng, 31, developed the software for the new camera while a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. He recently told PC Magazine:

"When a regular camera focuses physically, what the regular camera is doing is adjusting the lens relative to the sensor to bring different parts of the scene into focus. So if we have the whole light field, what we can do what that physical lens would normally have done, but in computation."

The Lytro is expected to hit store shelves later this year.

Images: Lytro

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