Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The Next Great Technology - Digital Imaging

Some of my "faithful readers" might recall my fascination with 3D printing and how it snuck up on me as a "woah - I would have never thought of that!" sort of thing.

Well, another one of these moments has occurred - this time it is a technological innovation as it relates to photography.  A start-up company down in the US has invented a new technology that is being referred to as a "Plenoptic" camera.  In essence, instead of just taking a very static bits and bytes type of image, it's actually capturing all of the light waves coming from all directions.

What does this really mean?  Well, believe it or not, you can take an "image" which has been captured via a plenoptic camera and with a special widget, you can post this image online and the USER can decide - dynamically - where they want the focal point to be.  To see how way cool this is, the following article actually has a plenoptic image of a flower.  If you go and click on a portion of the image in the background that is currently blurry, you'll see that the effective focal point of the image has been changed.

With innovations like this and 3D printing, I'm always wondering if technology is taking a big LEAP.  For many years now it's been just refining and optimizing existing technology.  Now, it's inventing new technologies that I had never considered.

New innovation in digital imaging.

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