Did you know that the Photoshop team has a resident theoretical physicist? If you’d like to meet him, check out next Thursday’s Silicon Valley ACM SIGGRAPH talk:
Recently we and others have gained deeper understanding of the fundamentals of the plenoptic camera and Lippmann sensor. As a result, we have developed new rendering approaches to improve resolution, remove artifacts, and render in real time. By capturing multiple modalities simultaneously, our camera captures images that are focusable after the fact and which can be displayed in multi view stereo. The camera can also be configured to capture HDR, polarization, multispectral color and other modalities. With superresolution techniques we can even render results that approach full sensor resolution. During our presentation we will demonstrate interactive real time rendering of 3D views with after the fact focusing.
See previous video: Adobe demos refocusable images.
Seems to be a very good technology! But who ever will be able to afford such a camera 🙁 ?
Would it be able to develop a much simpler version of that software, that could just take let`s say 2-4 images of an scene and turn those into a 3D object or a least make a normal 3 D image?
>But who ever will be able to afford such a camera 🙁
I’m probably mis-reading this technology, but I think the whole direction is toward very CHEAP yet very powerful imaging systems. I think “plenoptic” is a fancy way of refering to optics like “insect eyes.” Many, many trivial, cheap, simple lenses that use software to do all the formerly mechanical work like focusing. So, ultimately, I think EVERYONE will be able to afford such a camera because the whole lens “infrastructure” will be replaced by an array–like a insect’s eye–of non-moving inexpensive small lenses. The insect way is usually the cheap way. But I’m not an expert and I’m looking forward to what the experts say about the future of this technology.
I like the comment of Mark: Yes, this technology is all about replacing bulky, heavy, expensive lenses with cheap, thin microlens arrays; digitizing optics. Inexpensive but high quality refocusable after the fact 3D cameras.
I’m sure like any technology, as the ability to mass produce it becomes available the price will drop. Just think about the original digital cameras – those were $5000; now you can get a 5mp camera as part of your cell phone!
I wanted to say, that it would just be great, if we could take a normal DSLR, take a couple of pictures, where we move the camera on a tripod a couple of mm to the left and right and up and down. Then we have let`s say 2-10 pictures or so and could do some 3D stuff with it.