Stanford built a ‘4D’ camera for cars, robots and VR
Assistant prof. Gordon Wetzstein and postdoctoral scholar Donald Dansereau with a prototype of the monocentric camera that captured the first single-lens panoramic light fields.
A team of Stanford scientists have created what could be the perfect "eye"for autonomous vehicles and delivery drones thus far. It's a 4D camera that can capture nearly 140 degrees of information, allowing it to gather more information than conventional cameras in a single image. The researchers call their design the "first-ever single-lens, wide field of view, light field camera." It relies on light field photography for the additional info to make its results four dimensional. That means it can observe and record the direction and distance of the light hitting the lens and bundle it with the resulting 2D image.
As a result, the team's robot eye has the ability to refocus images after they're taken, which is light field photography's most popular feature. Remember Lytro?
See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/stanford-4d-camera-robots/