Record-breaking camera keeps everything between 3 cm and 1.7 km in focus

In photography, depth of field refers to how much of a three-dimensional space the camera can focus on at once. A shallow depth of field, for example, would keep the subject sharp but blur out much of the foreground and background. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have taken inspiration from ancient trilobytes to demonstrate a new light field camera with the deepest depth of field ever recorded. Their visual systems were quite complex, including compound eyes, featuring anywhere between tens and thousands of tiny independent units, each with its own cornea, lens and photoreceptor cells. One trilobyte in particular, Dalmanitina socialis, captured the attention of NIST researchers due to its unique compound eye structure.