Major public events like the Boston bombings reinforce the importance of spectators' iPhone photos, GoPro videos and surveillance footage from sidewalk cameras as officials enlist every source they can access in the search for answers.
The many hi-res iPhone photos we have of the scene are great, and better than what came before them, but all of them are grainy and unsatisfying, despite their apparent success in smoking out the Tsarnaev brothers.
There is better photo technology out there though, and my first thought is that THIS is what the Lytro camera was made to do.
If you're not familiar with Lytro, it uses what's called light-field technology that basically uses a 3-d light sensor to capture not a flat image but one with depth, with enough visual information to allow you to focus after the fact on whatever part of the image you like.
I don't have a Lytro, but I played around with one once, and this image from a crowded subway shows a little of how it works. Click on the face in front left, then on the blonde on the right, then at the back of the subway car and you see how the focus changes dynamically.
That means no matter what you were pointing your Lytro camera at when you took the picture, you can decide later on if you want the foreground, background, or middle ground in focus.
It's easy to criticize the apparent trend toward always-on lifecasting, even when you are not the one doing the lifecasting, (Google Glass, anyone?), but in times like these there never seem to be enough selfies, vlogs or surveillance videos with hi-res images that we want to use.
Imagine if iPhones somehow used light-field technology. Or imagine if surveillance cameras used Lytro technology? A few dynamic stills could definitely be more useful than grainy video in investigations like these.
We are still years away, sure, but the technology is here, and could be a game-changer in any situation where you need to scan an image of a crowd and produce usable visual information.
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