Lytro, a new company built on top of research done by a PhD student five years ago, is about to completely disrupt the digital camera market. And it looks like they're not going the route of licensing the technology to the heavy hitters like Nikon, Canon, or Olympus. This should be interesting.
The following is a Lytro-taken picture. Click around to refocus. This is one shot. Click on the reflection of the guy with the bright shirt in the crosswalk...and be amazed. (If it's not showing up click here).
I'm now wondering what implications this will have on the ability to create smart objects based on photographs alone... something that would be extraordinarily useful for mapping, spatial planning, and all around fundamentally enhancing to pretty much every documentational task you could think of.
