By Patricia Daukantas

As a high-school graduation gift, I got my first “real” camera – a 35-mm single-lens reflex, rather than a fixed-focus Instamatic for snapshots – and began to learn the artistic joys and challenges of manipulating the depth of field. What, in a scene, did I want to focus on? Sometimes I wanted to keep both foreground and background objects sharp and clear, but I couldn’t, especially when the ambient light level forced me to use a large aperture.

Now, researchers based at the University of Toronto (Canada) say that they’ve developed a new type of video camera that will keep high-resolution near- and far-field images in focus simultaneously.

This “Omni-focus Video Camera” is actually an array of color video cameras that are each focused at a different distance. The images from each of these video cameras are fed into a component invented by OSA Fellow – and frequent OPN contributor – Keigo Iizuka. This component, the “Divcam” (for Divergence-ratio Axi-vision Camera), performs real-time mapping of the distances between the pixels and the objects in the scene. Software developed by another Canadian scientist, David Wilkes, selects individual pixels from all the available camera outputs on the basis of the distance information and puts together a single image that is “omni-focused.”

The researchers say that the camera could have many different applications that could use greater depth of field, ranging from TV studio cameras to laparoscopic medical procedures.

The new camera isn’t commercially available yet, but the university recently announced it to the media. According to Iizuka, who is the principal investigator of the project as well as a Toronto engineering professor, the team last week submitted a comprehensive article about the camera to a scientific journal.

In the meantime, here are a couple of illustrations of the technology (photo credits: University of Toronto).

Above: Comparison between the Omni-focus Video Camera (a) and a conventional video camera (b). Note that the fingerprints are recognizable in (a).

Above: The eye of one sewing needle is captured through the eye of a second needle – 1.17 m in front of it.

Optics, Video Games and Shakespeare

By Patricia Daukantas

Greetings from Rochester! I am in this upstate New York community, where OSA was born, to attend Frontiers in Optics (FiO), our 92^nd annual meeting. This week I’ll be blogging from the conference.

Already I’ve been learning some cool things. Did you know, for example, that playing action video games may help your vision? Or that Shakespeare foreshadowed quantum optics?

During Sunday’s session titled “What’s Hot in Optics,” a useful road map to the FiO technical program, Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science reported that test subjects showed significant improvements in the spatial and temporal resolution of their visual processes after 10 hours of playing fast-paced action video games—the ones that require gamers to move quickly and “shoot” targets after making split-second decisions. Perhaps someday auto insurance companies will offer discounts to older drivers who expand their useful field of view by playing these action games.

OSA Past President (2004) Sir Peter Knight, this year’s recipient of the Frederic Ives Medal/Jarus Quinn Endowment, quoted a famous soliloquy from Macbeth in introducing his field of quantum optics and speculating on the non-classical nature of reality. Okay, so Shakespeare didn’t really use the word “quantum,” but you can ponder his words yourself:

Is this a dagger which I see before me

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see the still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Watch for OPN’s first-ever podcast after the conference. The podcast will feature exclusive content, including interviews with several distinguished invited speakers.