In the future you’ll never have to worry about taking blurry pictures whenever you go out on the town and get drunk. No matter how crappy your photography skills are future cameras will have infinite focus just like the Lytro camera that let’s you choose which objects to put in focus after you’ve taken a picture.
According to a new rumor, Toshiba is working hard on a chip that will bring perfectly focused pictures to your smartphone really soon. Their new sensor is a lot like the Lytro, except it’s small enough to fit in an iPhone.
Reports from Japan say that Toshiba has developed a cube-shaped module that contains an array of half a million lenses that can be placed in front of an image sensor so you get the same infinite-focus light field capture technology as the Lytro camera.
The module allows cameras to capture 500,000 tiny images and then pull them together to form the most accurate picture. It even measures the distance to each object the way two-lens 3D cameras work and it can use some magic to keep the foreground of your choice while swapping out the background – it makes it sound like Photoshop is about to get a lot easier.
The cube module is 1cm wide on each side so it wouldn’t fit in the iPhone 5’s 0.7cm thick casing, but maybe by the time Toshiba releases the module in 2014 it will be a bit thinner.
Steve Jobs talked with Lytro’s CEO Ren Ng about implementing light field technology into the iPhone, but the problem has been that the lens array needed for light field technology to work is too large to fit into a phone. Toshiba’s little module work around might be our best bet to getting perfectly focused pictures from our iPhones in the near future.
Source: Asahi Shimbun
Via: Gizmodo
