3D Camera in the Works at Stanford

Just when you thought you had finally mastered your digital camera, the time may come when you’ll have to toss it in the garbage and learn to use a 3D camera.

Stanford University, always at the cusp of technological advances - in fact, creating those very advances - is developing a 3D camera that will document not just the 2D photo of an object, but a three-dimensional ‘depth map’ of the surrounding objects, what they are calling a “kind of super-3D.”

The camera would use a “multi-aperture image sensor,” which is a fancy way of saying that the camera will have multiple lenses (up to 12, 616) capturing a variety of shots of the same scene, each assigned to a number of pixels.

The research team, headed up by professor Abbas El Gamal, could have a wide spectrum of uses. The first and obvious is for facial recognition. But other uses, according to the Stanford News Service, include “biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings.”