Reflectance paper is a surface that contains a lattice of mirrored dimples. The paper is printed with color and the angle-dependent reflectance function for each pixel of an image captured with a light field camera such as a

Lytro Lytro, Inc. was an American company founded in 2006 by Ren Ng which developed some of the first commercially available light-field cameras. Lytro began shipping its first generation pocket-sized camera, capable of refocusing images after being ta ...

. The image then displays differently depending on the angle of incident light in the viewing environment. This technique can be used for example to display the image of a sculpture with its direction-dependent shadow depending on the angle of the light.

History

As of 2012, researchers at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and 3M had created the first type of this kind of paper, using a hexagonal lattice of millimeter-sized

dimples A dimple, also called a gelasin (, ) is a small natural indentation in the flesh on a part of the human body, most notably in the cheek. Numerous cultures believe that cheek dimples are a good luck charm that entices people who perceive them as ...

. Dimple depth was 50

µm The micrometre ( international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American spelling), also commonly known as a micron, is a unit of length in the International System of Unit ...

, representing 70% of a hemisphere. Mirroring used silver or sputtered aluminum. A 32×32 matrix of light-field information was printed on a transparent mask over the dimples.

Notes

{{reflist Digital photography Science of photography Optical materials