Friday, January 09, 2026
This experimental camera can focus on everything at once
The Verge: A camera lens, historically, can only focus on one thing at a time, just like the human eye. That could be a thing of the past, though, thanks to a breakthrough lens technology developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that can bring every part of a scene into sharp focus, capturing finer details across the entire image, no matter the distance.
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3 comments:
This is really great to see. But as some who's been into the photography world. I question just how valuable a technology like this really is. From what I've read in the article. It seems that the user of this lens would have to take time away from getting photographs in order to "decide" what parts of the image they don't want in focus. That's swell. It gives a ton of freedom to what the lens can achieve a good focus on without needing to be say a certain focal length or capable of opening with a wide enough aperture. But the problem here is the time. Especially if you are shooting fast action. Are you supposed to tell the camera every single time you want a certain part of your image to be out of focus? If this was automated. How accurate would it be. It really just seems like the creators of this just made a manual focus lens. It seems to be so much more work than just using a standard lens.
Wow, let's go CMU! I'm so proud to hear about this technological breakthrough. I was thinking that it would really help the cinematic industry when it comes to full-scene shots. When the last part of this article mentioned VR headsets, I suddenly saw a whole new field of possibilities. With the growing demand and development of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, this all-capturing camera would really change what people can see and how people perceive the world. I would say, from my personal experience with using cameras to shoot videos, sometimes the sole focus point can be funky and annoying when it can't get to where I want it to be. With that multiple focus point possible, I wouldn’t have to worry about that problem. I really hope this technology will be incorporated into everyday cameras as well.
This seems really cool. Alongside another article I read about spraying and 3D printing concrete, there is a lot of research actively happening on campus that I know not about until it is done. I’m wondering what kind of innovation could this spark in film. There is the obvious effect of having super sharp images across planes in one shot to perhaps bring focus to the focus in the shot before or after, or to emphasize a landscape. I also wonder how this is working with reflective or otherwise problematic surfaces. This computation lens that combines Lohmann and phase-only spatial light modulation with CDAF and PDAF gives an uncanny effect, as it is different to how we see, but in a much different way than we expect a camera to do as much. The last paragraph of this article is a little up in the air to me, but a cool prospect: to apply this to other technologies like autonomous vehicles and microscopes.
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