Ex-Stanford student Ren Ng is just about to launch a new kind of camera that will blow you away. Don’t believe me? Try clicking around on this photo of a Scuba diver standing in front of distant mountains.

This is a single exposure, taken with one camera. See how you can move the point of focus anywhere, even after you have taken the photograph? I told you it was cool.

Ng’s company Lytro is planning on launching the camera this year. Regular Gadget Lab readers will recognize the technology as a a light-field, or plenoptic camera. These camera put an array of micro-lenses over the sensor. This lenticular array sits on the focal plane of the camera (where the light is focused by the lens — also known as the film plane), and the sensor sits slightly behind.

Thus the camera not only records the color and intensity of the light, but also the direction. Using some heavy processing, this information can then be used to do the magic you see above. It also replaces much of a camera’s precision mechanics with software.

While this after-the-fact focus choice is the clear wow factor, there are other neat tricks the camera can do with this information. First is that the camera can shoot in much lower light. Second is that, as the sensor is recording direction information, you can peek “behind” the edges of the foreground objects.

Lytro’s trick is to get this tech into a camera that is small and affordable enough for consumers, and in an interview with All Things D’s Ina Fried, he promised a “competitively priced consumer product that fits in your pocket” later this year.

At first, Lytro will make and market its own camera. I really can’t wait. Imagine being able to pick and choose just what is in focus when you get back home, just like we can do now with white balance and — to a certain extent — exposure. If it works as well as it seems from these sample photos, this could be huge.

Lytro Picture Gallery [Lytro via All Things D]

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