I work in computer vision, and there's an entire sub-branch called "computational photography" that aims to do more interesting things with cameras. The idea is

I work in computer vision, and there's an entire sub-branch called "computational photography" that aims to do more interesting things with cameras. The idea is that by capturing more information at the hardware level -- perhaps in some 'coded' form -- we can do much more with the captured data. Things like getting better quality images, getting depth information, capturing HDR images in a single image, etc. Many of these techniques require trading off spatial resolution for their benefits, thus making the increasing number of megapixels actually useful (i.e., so that when you lose 50% of your resolution to capture some other information, you're still left with a decent size image). A good page describing this field is http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/what_is/ http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/what_is/