Cool Optical Technology

A couple of years ago I attended a technical talk by Dr. Ren Ng, now the CEO of a company called Lytro. He talked about some aspects of the optical and mathematical methods now incorporated in Lytro's "light field camera." It's a pretty amazing technology now available as a product. Roughly speaking, by capturing additional information about the direction of light entering the camera when the picture is taken, digital images can be focused and zoomed after they are captured. This "Shoot Now, Focus Later" article from NPR explains the basics and includes a couple of interactive examples. Dr. Ng's Stanford Ph.D. thesis (PDF) explains a lot more.