Will Lytro's light field camera technology make its way into future iPhones?

Like it? Share it!

Will Lytro’s light field camera technology make its way into future iPhones?

According to Steve Jobs’ authorized biography, one of the things Jobs was always particular about with the iPhone was the camera. He wanted the iPhone to not be just a good phone, but one of the best point and shoot cameras, and it’s something the iPhone has always been good at.

While in the past year, several Android phones have come out with cameras equal to or better than the iPhone 4S, apparently at one point, Steve Jobs was in serious talks with Lytro about bringing their light field camera technology to future iPhones. Whether that is still a possibility or not is a maybe, but the idea is out there.

If you’re not familiar, Lytro is the creator of the tiny shoot now, focus later camera that uses a technology called “light field”, that captures an image with more depth and more flexibility when you take the picture, allowing you to do things like focus or unfocus parts of the picture later. Like magic.

Lytro’s technology relies on capturing far more information about a scene than a fixed grid of colored pixels. Using high resolution sensors combined with a specially designed micro lens array, the sensor captures the intensity, color, and direction of light rays entering a camera through a lens. That data can then be processed into the kind of flat, two-dimensional image that many of us are accustomed to.

However, that data can be mathematically manipulated to change various aspects of the image, including focus point, focal length, depth of field, and even perspective shift. All these details can be recalculated after the image is captured, removing the need to think about them while shooting.

While the details of that e-mail weren’t included in Lashinsky’s book, stuffing Lytro’s light field capture technology into an iPhone would be a revolutionary move if it were to come to be. The iPhone’s relatively bulky autofocus lens mechanism could be replaced with a sharper, more compact, and less prone-to-damage fixed focus lens. Without having to wait for the lens to focus, images can be taken even quicker, capturing what Cartier-Bresson called the “decisive moment.”

At the same time, users would not have to give up the benefits of selective focus. The iPhone’s camera software already has a UI for that—tap a point and the software can change the focus point as needed. Essentially, if users can get their subject into the frame, it’s possible to “perfect” the image later. Just swipe to adjust perspective, tap to change focus, move a slider to increase or decrease depth of field. It’s even possible to generate true 3D images from a single exposure using software alone.

Via