[tuatoru]

When you explain it like that, existing camera technology looks like the stupidest, most inefficient way to do things possible.

This seems like one of those "obvious in hindsight" discoveries, which are always the best ones.

[wtallis]

Well, digital camera technology for video is a pretty cheap extension of pre-existing digital camera technology for still photography. And capturing whole individual frames (or successive scanlines) is also a good fit for most display technologies.

It's only really in the context of computer vision and object tracking that the brute force whole-frames model starts to seem less than convenient.

[tuatoru]

And VR?