Light field
A lightfield 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 thing.
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 the eye.
A light field is typically non-relativistic.
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.
History
Leonardo da Vinci explored the idea of a scene consisting of light rays of various angles in the 1500s.[2]
The term "light field" was used by A. Gershun in a 1936 paper, published in an english translation in the year +1939.
Work in computational light fields was done by Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan in about 1995 and 1996.[3]
Light field rendering research in the 1990s was focused on novel viewpoints for existing data, but entirely for 2D screens.[4]
See also
References
- ↑ Gortler, Steven J.; Grzeszczuk, Radek; Szeliski, Richard; Cohen, Michael F. (1996). "The lumigraph". ACM. p. 43–54. doi:10.1145/237170.237200. ISBN 978-0-89791-746-9.
- ↑ http://lightfield-forum.com/2012/08/lightfield-history-who-invented-the-concept-of-the-light-field/
- ↑ "Light Field Rendering". http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/light/.
- ↑ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~dyer/cs534/papers/levoy-light-field-tutorial.pdf