A couple of reasons why I think this is cool. First, why would you want lightfields? Computational photography -> variable boken (e.g. fix the bokeh for differ

A couple of reasons why I think this is cool. First, why would you want lightfields? Computational photography -> variable boken (e.g. fix the bokeh for different depths, make it smoother, etc), depth info (extremely valuable for VFX), having some variability in your camera position - so being able to add camera shake more realistically. There's a bunch of other cool things you could do. I've only taken a look at existing lightfield solutions briefly, but this looks cool. It's novel because it seems to only use the bare possible minimum number of ray samples to be called a lightfield, and makes up for it with heavy compute (even heavier than a typical lightfield). This approach has interesting tradeoffs. A typical lightfield camera typically uses, say, 25 ray samples. This number of ray samples isn't enough to avoid compute, but cuts the resolution by a lot (25x in our case - instead of having 50 megapixels, you're at 2 megapixels). A typical implementation uses a micro-lens array in front of the camera sensor, and that means that there's wasted overhead due to tiling circles leaving a bunch of area empty. Their proposed approach "only" leaves you with 9x less resolution (which is cool), which they try to reconstruct / upscale back to 2x less resolution (which is also cool and should be workable).