3-D Camera Has 12,616 Lenses!

(image via Stanford News Service)

The Stanford News Service has a great article up this morning about their incredible new 3-D camera.

Dan Stober has this to say:
"The camera you own has one main lens and produces a flat, two-dimensional photograph, whether you hold it in your hand or view it on your computer screen. On the other hand, a camera with two lenses (or two cameras placed apart from each other) can take more interesting 3-D photos.

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 something potentially more valuable: an electronic "depth map" containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D."

Cool! One step closer to the Holodeck.