How Does Lytro Capture Light Fields for Virtual Reality? – ENGINEERING.com

Segment the human experience of light apart from the objective behavior of light unseen from our universe, and try to imagine seeing light in both its particle and wave form at the same time. In case you are struggling, here is a snapshot of the behavioral duality exhibited by light, captured as both a waveform and a stream of particles.

Over the past 200 years, cameras have evolved just as rapidly from analog to digital as they did from large to miniaturized. Now the worlds virtual reality and augmented reality enthusiasts are attempting to create more immersive experiences by altering and improving the way a physical environment is captured digitally. Capturing a physical environment digitally requires a 3D scanning system. The specific considerations needed for creating a digital version of an as-built model for virtual reality depend on the current technological limits of photorealistic reality capture.

A San Franciscobased company called Lytro has designed and constructed a light-field camera and developed an array system it calls Immerge to capture, compute and create an immersive virtual reality experience of a musical performance at St. Ignatius Church.

A light-field camera is designed to capture light from different angles to make images with depth and color, calculated from intersections of different angular directions of rays. Using an array of cameras set up in a predesigned capture matrix, each can be programmed to see different perspectivesexposure, shutter timing, focal length and position all carefully measured and quantized sequentially.

The creation of a multi-camera, array-based system requires the expenditure of considerable time and capital. But Lytro has developed an individual camera called Illum apart from Immerge. This array-based system of light-field technologies allows Lytro to capture a light field, calculate ray angles and then manifest a virtual representation for interactive immersion.

This incredible array of 475 cameras called Immerge captured and processed a huge amount of visual data using Googles cloud platform and custom rendering techniques designed by Lytro. (Image courtesy of Lytro.)

To learn more about this technology and the virtual reality capture at St. Ignatius Church, visit the Lytro blog.

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How Does Lytro Capture Light Fields for Virtual Reality? - ENGINEERING.com