SynthCam - Computational Photography on the iPhone

Marc Levoy, an electronics professor at Stanford, has published a cool app called SynthCam.

The basic idea behind the app is to capture many (parallel) images, which are slightly shifted from each other, and recombine them to first increase resolution and to simulate a larger aperture. Being a direct result of ongoing research, it does not perform every time as expected and you have to be super careful about not tilting the camera while jiggling it around, but it is amazing never the less.

This is going to be the stuff the future cameras are made of. Just replace unreliable jiggling around of the camera, with an array of a few hundred cheap and low resolution lens camera assemblies, on the back of something the size of an iPad as Ctein suggests, add the technology behind this small app and you’ve got your self a super-flat, high resolution, cheap camera, which can be shifted and refocused after you made the exposure.

Exciting times that we live in…