Article: Super 3-D Camera

YOUR CAMERA HAS ONE LENS and takes two-dimensional photographs.

But what if your digital camera saw the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself? You'd get a 2-D photo, but you'd also get an electronic depth map that contained the distance from the camera to every object in the picture-a kind of super 3-D.

Stanford University electronics researchers, led by Abbas El Gamal, an electrical engineer, are developing such a camera built around their multi-aperture image sensor. The plan is to create a camera that takes pictures that are really detailed depth maps, invisible in the photograph itself but electronically stored along with it. The map is a virtual ...

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