Lytro

Ever since the announcement of the Lytro camera, the idea of being able to select the focus point in an image after the fact has been intriguing some photographers. We've seen that same concept replicated by using a video file from a manually focussed DSLR, but a new app brings something similar to the iPhone.

Were you wowed by the ability of the Lytro camera to let you focus your image after you have already taken a photo? It turns out there's a straightforward way to replicate that same effect using any manual focus camera, and just a few seconds of video. Created by the Chaos Collective, it parses the focus changes in a video file into an interactive image like the ones Lytro makes.

When the Lytro camera was first announced, one of the early ideas was to use this technology for 3D image capture. Since the cameras recorded light rays in terms of the direction, color, and intensity of their travel, it's entirely possible to use that information to construct a 3D scene. The first iterations of the camera instead concentrated on selective focusing, but now Lytro is finally branching into 3D.

By far the trickiest thing to understand about the upcoming Lytro camera is the science behind its innovative ability to capture a light field rather than just an image. We delved into it briefly when the camera was first announced, but what the new technology boils down to is that instead of capturing each pixel on the sensor as a dot of color, it captures the direction and intensity of a ray of light.