Listed below are the light fields in our archive. For each light field, there is a link to the imagery - sometimes in several forms, and sometimes accompanied by calibration information. Following this is a link that allows you to view the light field in your browser using our Flash-based light field viewer.

Notes about the light field viewer

In most cases you shouldn't need to download any software to use our viewer; just click on the indicated links below. Be warned though, this involves loading the entire light field (usually at slightly reduced spatial resolution) into memory. For the largest light fields, this involves downloading about 30MB of data, and will cause your browser to use up to a gigabyte of RAM. Firefox 3 uses notably less RAM than Firefox 2 when viewing these light fields, as does Internet Explorer 7. Safari and Opera should also work, with the appropriate flash player plugin.

You're free to take the viewer and use it for your own light fields. The source code and instructions for the using or modifying viewer are available.

Instructions for the viewer

Once the light field loads, click and drag in the dark gray area on the left to change the point of view.

Shift click in the dark gray area to change the size of the synthetic aperture.

You can also click the 'Full Aperture' and 'Pinhole Aperture' buttons to change the size of the aperture.

Click the slider way over on the right to manually focus through the scene. It's best to do this with a medium-sized aperture.

Make sure your browser window is wide enough to see this slider.

Make sure your browser window is wide enough to see this slider. For some scenes, you can click on the image itself to autofocus at that point.

These instructions are all available within the viewer itself, if you click the 'How do I use this?' button.

The online viewer was written by Andrew Adams . The idea for the autofocus interaction was taken from Ren Ng's cool demos at Refocus Imaging

Light Fields from the Lego Gantry

The light fields in this section were acquired by Andrew Adams.

Microscope Light Fields

The light fields in this section were acquired by Marc Levoy. More detail on these datasets can be found at the Light Field Microscope page. Some things to be aware of when viewing these light fields using the Flash-based viewer:

They are low resolution . Unlike the other light fields on this page, these were captured with a single snapshot from a single camera. This means fewer total samples are available to record all the spatial and angular information, so the ouput spatial resolution is low. Even if we had multiple cameras, diffraction places a fundamental physical limit on the product of spatial and angular resolution we could capture. If you're more comfortable thinking of light as particles than as waves, then one way to think of this is as an application of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can either know where a photon is (high spatial resolution), or know its momentum (high angular resolution, i.e. views from lots of directions), but you can't know both with high accuracy.





. Unlike the other light fields on this page, these were captured with a single snapshot from a single camera. This means fewer total samples are available to record all the spatial and angular information, so the ouput spatial resolution is low. Even if we had multiple cameras, diffraction places a fundamental physical limit on the product of spatial and angular resolution we could capture. If you're more comfortable thinking of light as particles than as waves, then one way to think of this is as an application of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can either know where a photon is (high spatial resolution), or know its momentum (high angular resolution, i.e. views from lots of directions), but you can't know both with high accuracy. The output looks pixelated . This occurs because the original light fields have low spatial resolution, so the output window is upsampled for easier viewing. To view the light field at the original small resolution, use the 'with no magnification' links. You can also change the magnification by tweaking the zoom parameter in the url.





. This occurs because the original light fields have low spatial resolution, so the output window is upsampled for easier viewing. To view the light field at the original small resolution, use the 'with no magnification' links. You can also change the magnification by tweaking the zoom parameter in the url. The output becomes darker when using the full aperture . This occurs because brightness falls off as you approach the edges of the aperture in a microscope, hence these samples are dim. You can see this by using a pinhole aperture and panning slowly to the edge of the view for each light field, or slowly shrinking the aperture from full to pinhole. Our LFDisplay viewer (see below) normalizes the rendered image automatically to avoid this darkening.





. This occurs because brightness falls off as you approach the edges of the aperture in a microscope, hence these samples are dim. You can see this by using a pinhole aperture and panning slowly to the edge of the view for each light field, or slowly shrinking the aperture from full to pinhole. Our LFDisplay viewer (see below) normalizes the rendered image automatically to avoid this darkening. A sudden jump happens at the very edges of the aperture. This occurs when adjacent lenslet images slightly overlap in the rectified camera image, which means views from opposite sides of the microscope aperture add together on the sensor. Tweaking the numerical aperture (NA) of the microscope objective or the F-number of the microlenses would have eliminated this crosstalk.

You can also view these light fields using LFDisplay, our hardware-accelerated viewer for microscope light fields. This viewer requires downloading an executable, but it won't have the resolution limitations of the Flash-based viewer.

Light Fields from the Gantry

The light fields in this section were acquired by Vaibhav Vaish.

Light Fields from the Camera Array

The light fields in this section were acquired by Bennett Wilburn and Neel Joshi.

© 2008 Stanford Graphics Laboratory

Created by Vaibhav Vaish. Updated by Andrew Adams.

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