Video: Introducing the Stanford LightField Microscope
The following video, brought to our attention by reader Alejandro, shows how LightField technology can significantly augment traditional microscopy:
The advantages are numerous, and represent the “ordinary” LightField Features but applied to microscopy: Instead of just a single “head-on” orthographic view, a plenoptic microscope setup allows for software refocus, increased depth of field, focal stacks, oblique orthographic views and perspective, 3D reconstruction and volume rendering.
The Stanford LightField Microscope was first presented at the SIGGRAPH conference in 2006. The short list of authors/collaborators for the project and publication contains several familiar names: Apart from Ren Ng, who went on to found Lytro, Marc Levoy and Mark Horowitz are LightField experts who are now part of Lytro’s Techical Advisory Board.
Pictures and information from: Levoy M., Ng R., Adams A., Footer M. & Horowitz M. 2006. Light Field Microscopy. ACM Transactions on Graphics 25(3), Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2006
Notice the similarities to this setup :)
My Plenoptic Microscope construct….constructed in Dec 2012 is based on this design but cost a lot less.. and it works… http://i740.photobucket.com/albums/xx49/pleecan/PLeePlenopticMicroscope_zps658361d5.jpg