Filip Novotny "Plenoptics is the first major change in the field of photography since the 19th century," he wrote two years ago about this new server technology TechCrunch. "I want to reinvent photography," he declared once Steve Jobs. And the forty-three newly granted patents prove that Apple is apparently still interested in the revolution in the field of photography.
A set of patents deals with so-called plenoptic photography. This new technology makes it possible to change the focus of the image only after it has been taken, thus providing the user with certain advantages. Since out-of-focus images can be easily corrected, the photographer basically does not have to deal with the focus at all and can take pictures faster. A single photo can also provide several interesting effects simply by changing the plane of focus.
This technology has already been implemented in one commercial product. Plenoptic camera Lytro it is well known for its unprecedented features as well as its quality design. But it also has one major problem – low resolution. If the user decides to convert the proprietary format to classic JPEG, he must expect a final size of 1080 x 1080 pixels. That's just 1,2 megapixels.
This disadvantage is caused by the technical complexity of the optics used. In order for plenoptic cameras to work, they need to recognize the direction of individual light rays. To do this, they use an array of miniature optical lenses. There are a total of one hundred thousand of these "microlenses" in the Lytro camera. Therefore, if Apple wanted to use this technology in one of its mobile devices, it would probably have major problems with sufficient miniaturization.
However, the filed patents also eliminate the disadvantage of low resolution to some extent. They expect that it would be possible to switch from plenoptic photography to classic mode at any time. This would allow the user to lose the ability to additionally adjust the sharpness of the image, but on the other hand, he could use a much higher resolution. The possibility of switching between modes would be provided by a special adapter, which can be seen on one of the illustrations, which Apple added to the patent.
Photos with the possibility of additional focus could one day (though probably not soon) also appear in the iPhone, for example. Steve Jobs already saw great potential in plenoptic photography. As written in prince Adam Lashinsky Inside apple, Jobs invited Ren Ng, CEO of Lytro, into his office one day. At the end of his presentation, both of them even agreed that their companies should cooperate in the future. However, this has not happened yet. Apple instead builds on Lytro's work in their patents (and gives them proper credit for it, too).
