Your current camera almost certainly produces a flat, two-dimensional photograph. A camera with two lenses can take more interesting 3-D photos.
But a camera the sees the world through thousands of tiny lenses can produce an electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, resulting in a kind of super 3-D.
Electronics researchers are developing such a camera. They’ve shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, and grouped them in arrays of 256 pixels each, with a tiny lens atop each array.
Such a camera could be used for biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings. It could also be used to give robots better spatial vision than humans.