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Comment by adg001 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this line of research will be commercially exploited.

Although the reached depth of field was much shorter, this work reminds me about Lytro [0] Illum, a camera capable of refocusing the image after being taken. Announced in 2014 it received significant hype, but it never reached commercial success. One factor that hindered its adoption was the absence of a standard file format and the corresponding viewers for their "living pictures" – adopters were forced to publish their images on Lytro's website in order to allow viewers the ability to refocus the image.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro

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I recall somewhere that this same type of optics can make heads-up displays that have depth of field as perceptible to the eye, but I can't find the reference. It does sort of make sense tho

> commercially exploited

I feel like this is an odd way to put it.

> > commercially exploited

> I feel like this is an odd way to put it

Actually this is the standard way to put it, at least in my corner of the globe (i.e., europa.eu)

> I recall somewhere that this same type of optics can make heads-up displays that have depth of field as perceptible to the eye, but I can't find the reference. It does sort of make sense tho

Yeah, the lack of this effect is one reason that VR games cause nausea. Unfortunately, even if light field displays were cheap (they're not), rendering to them was extremely expensive last I checked (around 50x more expensive than running in stereo)

VR video (not only 360, but also with a bit of wiggle room for your head to move) comes to mind. See this impressive demo presented at Sigraph two years ago (if possible with a VR headset) : https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/

Impressive indeed! Thank you so much for this reference.

If high quality light field displays become common place they might be. Think like a 3D display that looks more like a window then a display.

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