Light field

A light field, or lightfield, is a physical field that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in a three-dimensional space. The mathematical space of all possible light rays is given by the five-dimensionalplenoptic function (with three position coordinates and two direction angles as arguments), and the magnitude of each ray is given by its radiance.

Michael Faraday was the first to propose that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working. The term light field was coined by Andrey Gershun in a classic 1936 paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space.

The term "radiance field" may also be used to refer to similar, or identical concepts. The term is used in modern research such as neural radiance fields.