On the personal side, I was rock climbing and taking pictures with my friends. We took all sorts of portrait and action pictures, and I was thinking at the time that these are inherently difficult to focus correctly.
Yes, we are a producer of cameras, but we understand that at the end of the day, you have to make photos in software. A lot of companies focus on the camera side, and a lot are on the software side. There's a chasm between the two.
I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.
With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.
With Illum, we're able to start to customize that supply chain in a very deep way... to rethink the entire imaging pipeline.
Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.
Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together.
