Tech Project

Description of the challenges faced by the Tech Project

The lens is circa 25 cm long. It works with any DSLR / Mirrorless full frame camera. Display and searcher may not work perfectly, but we can add external devices to the hot shoe of the camera to enable these functionalitites. The glass of the lens is not adjusted to 40mp pixel size, but we expect that 20mp can be fully shown. The software will either be fast and not perfect in the depth dimension or slow but higher quality. In video mode, it will definitely be slow. At the time of the project, the software may not in all lighting conditions allow for perfect results. Resolution may be as low as 1/9 of normal camera resolution. Artefacts should be expected. We will be working on the improvement of all such weaknesses. Our target is to reach 50% sensor resolution and no artefacts.

Brief description of technology

We develop a lightfield lens, which we call K|Lens. It can be used with any standard DSLR camera. By a complex mirror system inside the lens, it enables the camera to record several perspectives of the scene simultaneously on the same sensor. By view interpolation and disparity estimation, these perspectives can be used to generate a lighfield and to provide depth information about the scene. Our software makes this additional information available in the post-processing. As functionalities, we are developeping setting of focus and blur in the postprocessing, image segmentation, layer based editing, perspective changes and the combination thereof. Many additional functions can be developed. The software is designed as photoshop plug-in. So both hardware and software are fully adapted to the photographic workflow.

What the project is looking to gain from the collaboration and what kind of artist would be suitable

We want to find new application cases to our lightfield technology creating new markets or access to new customers. This includes experimentation in standard terms of photography, but also the opening up to new possibilitites, e.g. the setting of more than one focus plane, tilting focus planes, creative work on depth maps etc, use of non-traditional display methods such as holograms etc. We are looking for a technically versatile experimental photographer, 3D or lightfield artist with an open mind to computational photography and post production.

Resources available to the artist

The artist will be placed in our office in the center of Saarbrücken. Our equipment including work place, photo studio, internet, cameras, lenses, software, PC and more equipment is fully available. Budget for travel for artistic production purposes can be made available upon discussion.