Unlike an ordinary camera, which mainly records the intensity of incoming light, a light field camera also captures information about the direction from which the light arrived. This allows it to recover depth and reconstruct a scene in three dimensions.

The technology relies on a micro-lens array (MLA) placed between the camera’s main lens and imaging sensor. Each microscopic lens acts like a tiny camera, recording the same scene from a slightly different angle. When the information from all of these lenses is combined, the system can reconstruct a light field, which describes the intensity, position, and direction of the incoming light.