Photography Without a Lens? Future of Images May Lie in Data
25th December 2015
The optics of the camera obscura have faithfully served photographers for ages. The recipe has been simple: a lens, aperture, dark box and something to record the light.
But the camera as we know it is changing. A revolution in digital imaging research could surpass the camera obscura in almost every technical way: resolution, size and energy efficiency. It’s called computational photography, and it stems from the idea that if you can capture visual data instead of a true image, then the picture can be reconstructed with software.
With cameras capturing light differently, a lens isn’t necessarily needed anymore. Instead, visual data can be gathered by playing tricks with light, like forcing it through a microscopic grating or diffracting it through a glass sphere. Years ago, this technology was just in the lab. But now it has made its way into consumer smartphones.