The Lytro Camera: How it works (without marketing)

The Lytro Camera's engineering (and especially marketing) teams freely use technical jargon to describe their invention. However, what they do can be distilled into much simpler terms. So after reading through the founder's Stanford thesis, and other online resources, here's my take on how the Lytro works.<p>Just like any camera, the Lytro has an optical lens that focuses to any distance. It has a relatively large aperture of f/2.0, which allows for a relatively shallow depth of field.<p>The only bit of hardware that's special or unique about a light-field camera is its 'micro-lens' array. The array is a repeated pattern of 3x3 matrices. Each of these 9 different microlenses focuses the light slightly closer or slightly farther away than the others. When you take a picture, the camera records data on the sensor that is then processed into exactly 9 pictures, each corresponding to a slightly different focal length (and therefore a slightly different band of the photo that’s in focus).<p>The software then uses contrast detection to make a 20x20 sub-matrix indicating which of the nine images is in focus at the chosen point in the image. When you click on a point on a ‘living image’, it looks up that point and loads the image for which that point is most in focus.<p>The Lytro contains an 11 megapixel sensor. But because it takes 9 photos at once, the effective resolution of the final photograph is 1080x1080 pixels.<p>It’s not a very complicated design: A microlens array that adjusts the focus on a small scale to produce 9 different images, each with a slightly different range of focus.<p>Thinking about ‘rays’ of light isn’t necessary to understand how it works.<p>Here’s a video of the founder getting tripped up when a reporter pinpoints how his technology works (1:05)<p>http://video.forbes.com/fvn/sxsw-2012/eric-cheng-lytro-lightfield-camera