The camera wasn’t at all good at taking garden-variety snapshots, and its grainy, undersized touchscreen was a major design flaw. And with a starting price of $399, it was no impulse purchase.

Meet Lytro, the Light-Field Camera that Snaps 4D Pics 3 minute read By TIME Staff October 20, 2011 10:00 AM EDT ...

Lytro's new Immerge has the ambitious goal of capturing all the light rays visible from its camera location -- including both their color and direction -- essentially an entire light field ...

Although research surrounding light-field technology began in the 1990's at Stanford University, according to Ng, this is the first time a product like this is being created on a consumer level.

Conventional camera-makers talk about megapixels, the number of dots of information that make up an image; Lytro talks in terms of megarays to describe the amount of light captured.