This Changes Everything

Announcing Lytro, the camera that captures pretty much everything - essentially a 3D image that can be rendered as such, or as a variable focus, variable depth of field 2D image. The company calls them Living Pictures, and the raw data is the Light Field. Here's an example - click around the image to change focus:



It seems to me that, for demo purposes, they've created a depth map and pre-generated three or four images there. I imagine the computation time to refocus is nontrivial, so a simple focus or depth of field slider wouldn't be very effective.

Here's the take on it from the New York Times, and CNN Tech.