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Comment by mcescalante | Hacker News Reader

I may be wrong because I don't know much about image based algorithms, but this seems to be a pretty successful new approach to achieving this effect. Are there any other existing "lens blur" or depth of field tricks that phone makers or apps are using?

I'd love to see their code open sourced.

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SynthCam is one, free but not open source. You might be interested in the various bits of lightfield rendering code released by Stanford: http://lightfield.stanford.edu/

Synthetic aperture-like algorithms are also common at SIGGRAPH if you go through the past two decades.

A quick search didn't unearth any, but there is open source software to do parallax depth inferencing, and you could just apply proportional gaussian blur kernels to each depth segment to get a very similar effect.

Gaussian blur looks very different from the blur produced by an aperture. You need a round blur kernel, not one with a bell curve fall-off.

The novelty I see here, is the combination and integration into an app. Creating blurred images from a photograph and its depth map can be achieved with a GIMP plugin since at least 2008 [1]. Combining a series of photos to create a 3D model is also widely implemented, e.g. in the Photosynth application developed at U Washington/Microsoft which according to Wikipedia exists as a tech preview since 2006.

[1] http://registry.gimp.org/node/1444

Super, this is exactly what I was wondering - whether they really had done something brand new or just put it into an app that lets you choose the blur point yourself after.

Well, the only "new approach" I can see here is letting the user decide which part of image should be sharp. BlessN900 camera app for Nokia N900 was doing exactly what this new app does few years ago, but it was choosing the focus point automatically.

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