Overview
The light field, first described in Arun Gershun's classic 1936 paper of the
same name, is defined as radiance as a function of position and direction in
regions of space free of occluders. In free space, the light field is a 4D
function - scalar or vector depending on the exact definition employed. Light
fields were introduced into computer graphics in 1996 by Marc Levoy and Pat
Hanrahan. Their proposed application was image-based-rendering -
computing new views of a scene from pre-existing views without the need for
scene geometry. (A
workshop on image-based modeling and rendering was held at Stanford in
1998.)