Prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner

The video is fascinating, but a complete fabrication in terms of actual consumer products. The plank at 2:50 is an excellent example: to see past the plank entirely, the camera array would have to be wider than the plank. Probably 6 inches or so, in that case.

We may see it, and multiple smaller lenses could indeed solve the crappy-focus problems, and still keep the resolution high. But until I see a legitimate demonstration, I highly doubt the shiny through-occlusion tracking will work as well in any product using it. Better than current cameras, certainly - it can still track depth - but nothing like their examples.

I love computational photography.

For a better understanding of how this works, watch the video at: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

I'm curious whether this is actually going to work in practice, because the see-throughish behavior leads me to think that there's a large separation distance between the individual cameras in the experiments (perhaps the test cameras are too large to bring them, say, 0.2 mm apart) whereas this would not be the case on a tiny cellphone camera.

Does this have any connection to the multi-lensed eyes of insects?

First the picture shows a finished conventional camera module, packaged and including the focus, zoom drives, cable and connector. The concept camera apparently doesn't need any PCB or link to the camera.

The limit on cellphone cameras isn't optical it's computational - the CPU and battery power isn't there to stream more than VGA resolution movies at 60fps, so how is it going to do the image combination for this?