A company named Lytro is developing some amazing stuff.  This all came out of research at Stanford.  One of the students, Ren Ng, decided to form a company to create publicly available devices, and bring the technology from lab to life.  One offshoot of this research is the Stanford CityBlock project.  Google’s StreetView grew out of that project. 

This is some truly amazing technology which could revolutionize the way we capture images.  You don’t focus the camera, you just shoot.  You do your focusing later!  Also, if you share an image with somebody, they can refocus and zoom at will.  Amazing stuff!

Play with one of the images from Lytro's photo gallery here!  There are more images to view and play with on Lytro's site.

You can double-click to zoom, and single-click to change focus to a certain area of the picture: