Steve Jobs: “…And here it is.”
We have come full circle!
Jokes aside, camera arrays are actually an excellent way to improve image capture while maintaining a small form factor. There’s a reason many bugs have many eyes. It’s more reliant of software to resolve the image, but it allows more information to come in without increasing the lens size.
That’s the great part, you actually dont. The image can be resolved with the data available from the others.
My phone has 2 rear cameras, ignoring the selfie camera. I definitely know which camera is which. One is for images, the other is for LIDAR.
Bugs don’t have much “software” going on, and the reason for many lenses is only superficially similar. On phones you want different lenses to do different things, while the bug has different lenses to look into different directions without all the volume “between” eyes also needing to be lens (I think).
Unfortunately brains are computers I’m sorry. It’s not exactly software but it is a computation. Many insects have compound eyes that allow them see in many directions. Compound eyes are collections of eye that form one large eye. This does not indicate directly that they do this to prevent the space between the eye from also being an eye. Having many eyes from different perspectives can be useful for many reasons. A big one being depth perception.
You know, one sensor with a rotating lens selector might actually make sense?
