Re:Experimenting with Light Fields
by erikpukinskis on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @11:22PM
(#16645418)
Light fields are large, but not insane, because they are highly compressible. Think of them as a matrix of images, each representing a micro lens at a point in the field. Most patches of the image seen through each lens are roughly similar to a patch in the non-light field JPEG.... just skewed to a slight different place.
This isn’t 100%... new image can be exposed by looking around a corner, shifting reflections, etc. But each lens requires adding less and less to your compression table.
So really, the light field is an index into a slightly expanded compression space more than it’s a whole new set of data.
As for the complexity of rendering... it’s just a JPEG with a gnarly projection equation. There’s nothing fundamentally more complicated about that... although it’s complex math.
As with anything it takes time for code to mature, but in the limit there’s nothing fundamentally more complicated about it than playing compressed video.
There’s probably some efficiency to be gained with custom compression algorithms and custom hardware, although I don’t know enough about existing video compression hardware to say for sure how far the existing chips will get us.
This isn’t 100%... new image can be exposed by looking around a corner, shifting reflections, etc. But each lens requires adding less and less to your compression table.
So really, the light field is an index into a slightly expanded compression space more than it’s a whole new set of data.
As for the complexity of rendering... it’s just a JPEG with a gnarly projection equation. There’s nothing fundamentally more complicated about that... although it’s complex math.
As with anything it takes time for code to mature, but in the limit there’s nothing fundamentally more complicated about it than playing compressed video.
There’s probably some efficiency to be gained with custom compression algorithms and custom hardware, although I don’t know enough about existing video compression hardware to say for sure how far the existing chips will get us.