If you’re not familiar with the Lytro, it’s a little camera you can take pictures with, and then focus afterwards, or even upload photos that let you click on a specific area to bring it into focus. It’s an incredibly technology, to say the least. And now it looks like Toshiba wants to cram it into your phone.
Toshiba
The “cube-shaped” device works kind of the same way you can turn two images into a 3D one by putting them next to each other. There are thousands of lenses in front of a powerful sensor. The sensor collects all the different images and stitches them into a collage of sorts that allows you to choose the focus of the photo.
The technology is fairly impressive, although substantially different from how Lytro does business for obvious reasons. That said, it’s also tricky to get into phones because of its shape.
Nonetheless, Toshiba expects to start putting these into smartphones by the end of next year, so you might want to start looking at your Facebook privacy policy accordingly.
Toshiba Plans Mobile Camera Sensor With Post-Shot Focusing [Electronista]