The camera world is abuzz by what could be a truly game-changing technology that will excite not only photographers but engineering geeks. I had heard it rumoured before now the announcement has hit. 31-year old wunderkind Ren Ng is now touted in the NY Times for developing a technology that can take an image that can later be adjusted for plane of focus and depth of field, all from the same captured information. The Lytro website explains it:

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It 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 cannot record the light field.

Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.

The revolutionary sensor is described as a micro array of many lenses, all taking in the needed light information, and backed up by software that allows you to choose the way the shot is composed. I wonder how many gigabytes such an image might be?

The Lytro has built and tested prototypes and hopes to be in the market in the coming year aimed at the consumer market. Incredible.

The links below have demos to help you with the concept. Wow.

Links

Lytro picture gallery
NY Times: Lytro's Camera Lets You Shoot First and Focus Later
BuzzBlog: New camera technology lets you shoot first, focus later
If You Thought Color's $41 Million Pre-Launch Round Was Big, Lytro's $50 Million Is Bigger And Worth Every Penny