The camera you own has one main lens and produces a flat, two-dimensional photograph, whether you hold it in your hand or view it on your computer screen. On the other hand, a camera with two lenses (or two cameras placed apart from each other) can take more interesting 3-D photos.
But what if your digital camera saw the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself” You’d get a 2-D photo, but you’d also get something potentially more valuable: an electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D.
Stanford electronics researchers, lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing such a camera, built around their “multi-aperture image sensor.” They’ve shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They’ve grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each, and they’re preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.
Related posts:
- New Nikon Zoom Lenses – 14-24mm f/2.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8
- Sigma 18-50mm and 55-200mm HSM Lenses for Nikon DSLRs
- Sigma 10mm and 4.5mm Lenses Announced
- New Sigma HSM lenses for Nikon (17-70mm f2.8-4.5 DC Macro HSM and 18-50mm f2.8 EX DC Macro HSM)
- Nikon D40 and D40x Compatible Sigma Lenses
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