Imagine inventing an entirely new kind of car engine that runs on, say, bacon. Well, you can’t just stick your new bacon engine into your car and expect it to run perfectly. You need to engineer it, then smooth out the kinks so that your bacon car runs as well as any other. And, since you’re the inventive type, you probably want the bacon engine to allow you to do something magical – something more than just driving around like you could in a regular car.
Same story with the Lytro camera…minus the bacon.
It takes a village to bring Lytro to life, but three engineers on the Lytro image quality team are core to turning complex engineering into the simple beauty you see in living pictures.
In their element - Brian Cabral, Bennett Wilburn and Chia-Kai Liang (photo: Eric Cheng)
Engineers Brian Cabral, Bennett Wilburn, and Chia-Kai Liang represent some serious brainpower in the fields of light field science and computational photography. Brian’s background includes high-level positions at NVIDIA and Silicon Graphics, with quite a few patents and papers in computer graphics and computational photography. Chia-Kai received his PhD from National Taiwan University where his thesis was about light field capturing and processing. Bennett was on his way to a PhD in circuit design at Stanford, but switched his focus (pun intended) to computer graphics and vision. For this thesis, he designed the Stanford Multiple Camera Array, a system with 100 custom video cameras that could capture light field video. Yikes, brainpower, indeed.