Light field

Imagine taking a picture with a regular camera. That camera captures the light from the scene you're taking a picture of and turns it into a flat, two-dimensional image. But what if you could capture more information about the light in the scene? That's where the light field comes in.

The light field is all the information about the light in a scene, including its intensity and direction. It's kind of like the difference between looking at a flat image and looking at a 3D object.

Think of the light field as a collection of rays of light coming from all different directions in a scene. These rays of light bounce around and reflect off objects, creating the colors and brightness that we see. If we could capture information about all these rays of light, we could recreate the scene in 3D.

To do this, we need a special type of camera called a light field camera. This camera captures not just the intensity of the light, but also the direction it's coming from. It does this by using an array of tiny lenses to capture multiple viewpoints of the scene. These viewpoints are combined to create a 3D image that you can look around in and explore as if you were actually there.

So, to summarize: the light field is all the information about the light in a scene, and a light field camera captures that information to create a 3D image.