We talked about a post on 3D photography a couple weeks ago and it looks like they’re working on a camera that may make that a reality. Stanford (read:smart) researchers are developing a prototype camera with 12,616 lenses that will add another dimension to our life.
I can’t wait until they come out with holograms.
The prototype camera shoots regular 2D images, but it also creates a “depth map” that remembers distances from the camera to every object in your photo.
Lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, Stanford electronics researchers are developing this super 3D camera built around a “multi-aperture image sensor.” This is a story of science meeting art in a geeky, brilliant and beautiful way: They shrunk pixels on the sensors to 0.7 microns (much smaller than a standard digital camera), they’ve grouped pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each and they will place a lens on top of each array. So what does the highly technical explanation mean for you? Three dimensions.
“It’s like having a lot of cameras on a single chip,” Keith Fife, a graduate student working with El Gamal, said in a news release. If researchers can get the prototype 3 megapixel chip to work, it would give them 12,616 cameras in one.
Does this mean we could get 12,616 camera cases?
…
Yeah okay, I’m done with bad humor, sorry about that one.
However it is an interesting though to think of photos with a third dimension. This would be the biggest innovation in photography since color. Although it basically means that we can’t find that flattering angle to hide the beer gut.
Dang.
Digital Journal has the information of the 3D camera with 12,616 lenses.
