Light field
A light field is an area or volume of light treated as a set of rays, where each ray has a magnitude and angle. A light field is the set of light rays flowing through a point, surface or volume from every direction. It approximately represents how light travels in physical space from a ray optics perspective. It is also known as a radiance field.
A light field can be displayed using a light field display, which is a type of multifocal display.
It is possible to record a light field using a light field camera, such as a camera from Lytro.
"Lightfield", "plenoptic", and "integral imaging" are all the same.
A light field can be represented using a plenoptic function, which is a 5 dimensional function. A light field can be represented in 4 dimensions using the two-plane method.[1]
Light fields are useful for 3D because the largest or second largest factor that determines focus is the angle of rays coming into a human eye.
Representation
There are multiple ways to represent a light field using data. A method is the two-plane method.
A light field can be black and white or full color.
Light fields can be represented using euclidean geometry, instead of having to use a relativistic understanding.
History
Leonardo da Vinci explored the idea of a scene consisting of light rays of various angles.[2]
The term "light field" was used by A. Gershun in a paper.
Work in computational light fields was done by Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan.[3]
Light field rendering research has focused on novel viewpoints for existing data, but largely for 2D screens.[4]
See also
References
This page uses XVRWiki's article text.