[jbandela1]

On a side note, do you think think type of light field photography could be packaged in a phone camera? Right now we have multiple lenses sticking out the back of the phone. Could we replace all that with just a single large light sensor?

[GeompMankle]

If I correctly interpreted your question as ending in "a single large light[field] sensor], no. Light field cameras take a single field of view and overall entrance pupil and then, given that field of view, they trade resolution for being able to specifically note which part of the entrance pupil saw the object in that low resolution way. As a person who specializes in physical optics rather than computational optics, my extremely biased standpoint is that light field sensors can take one really great camera and make it into a bunch of fairly poor cameras collecting 3D depth information. If you value 3D depth information and the ability to add realistic depth of field blur to a photo more than the 2D resolution and sensitivity/noise properties of the photo, lightfield is for you.

The reason we have multiple lenses sticking out of a phone is to achieve similar high image pixel counts at high sensitivity/low noise across wildly different fields of view (say 108 deg, 69 deg, 28 deg) and wildly different per-pixel angular fields of view in a cost effective manner. A single imaging block capable of seeing a whole 108 deg field of view wide camera image with the per-pixel angular field of view of the 28 deg telephoto imager is generally infeasible in a cost effective way unless you are IMAX.

[jbandela1]

Thank you for your detailed answer.