[amluto]

Huh, guess I'm out of date here.

Is it really a JPEG stack? I had assumed there was more magic (i.e. math and clever compression) than that. Or is a JPEG stack with extra fanciness?

I'd love to read up on how this stuff actually works. I know how to calculate the theoretical information capacity in a light field (hint: very very dense) but basically nothing about how people manage to munge it into something compact and useful.

[dwaxe]

At its core, the viewer works by just averaging the JPEG stack at varying offsets as described in this student project: https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs194-26/fa14/upload/files/p...

I haven't looked into how they make everything efficient, but the source code for their flash viewer is here http://lightfield.stanford.edu/aperture.html

[catbird]

Well, the raw picture (light field) from the camera looks like something from an insect's eye - a hexagonal grid of tiny pictures saved into one giant jpeg [1]. The Lytro software processes that data into a stack of jpegs of reconstructed views at varying focal lengths when you first import the image.

[1] see for example http://lightfield-forum.com/2012/07/lytro-hack-how-to-extrac...