Lytro's revolutionary camera tech lets you shoot now, focus later.

Photography will never be the same. Imagine a still image that works jet like the human eye. Select any depth of field you desire and change it at will. That's what Lytro has achieved and later this year, with $50 million in venture funding, they intend to release a camera that allows you to shoot now, focus later. Very cool.

Here's how it works. Click anywhere in the image above to set focus at another depth in the picture (the signs in the background are a good choice). Watch the focus change. Lytro's technology takes advantage of something that conventional cameras do not: the light field. The light field is made up of all of the light rays in a scene, the means every single light ray traveling in every direction through every point in space.

Scientists have imagined light-field cameras since the early 20th century, but the challenge required the technical equivalent of 100 digital cameras and a supercomputer. The Lytro camera takes that requirement and stuffs it into a regular-sized point-and-shoot. The company achieves this with an innovative sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor takes in three pieces of data about each ray of light: its color, intensity and direction. Conventional camera sensors just add up all the light rays and record them as one amount of light instead of recording information about each ray. The photographic analogy to multi-track audio recording with each instrument on a separate track to be mixed later.

If they can succeed in getting product out at a reasonable price this would, indeed, be the beginning of a photographic revolution. Question is, however, what platform support will the world need to support this over Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and the many other phot-sharing services out there? In the meantime, have fun with these other Lytro images, or take yourself over to their site and see some more.