What does your smartphone camera actually do when you take a picture?  It collects information about the intensity of the light as it enters the imaging sensor and from that data constructs a two dimensional image of the three dimensional image you were viewing.  While this sounds like a massive reduction in the information that exists in the real world, much of which is processed by your visual cortex, we have become quite used to such 2 dimensional images, since 1839 when Alphonse Giroux signed an agreement to commercialize his camera with Mande Daguerre, who had developed a process for single shot photographic printing.  Since then 2 dimensional photographs have become the standard for almost every application where an image is recorded on a directly viewable substance.
3D, in various forms, has been around for many years, entering and exiting the consumer electronics space at various times as the technology develops, and AR/VR, a more common form of 3D imagery, is becoming a commercial product, but is there any way to use the information available in a say, smartphone camera, to do more than produce a 2 dimensional image?  Enter the light-field camera, a sort of 3D camera, but not one where you need special glasses of a helmet to see a 3D image. In full disclosure, the three dimensional images we are speaking about here are not the roller coaster or animation type of images usually associated with 3D, but are more normal images that you can take with your smartphone camera, or will in the near future.
The system uses what is called a plenoptic camera, which is a fancy name for a camera that has a set of micro-lenses in front of the imaging sensor.  Not only would the camera pick up the light intensity, as any camera would, but also gathers information about the direction that the light rays are moving, which allows the software to modify the image in ways a typical 2D camera cannot.  There are a number of characteristics that can be derived from the information collected by a light-field camera, that allow the user to not have to choose the point of focus in an image, in other words the software can use all of the image data to keep every part of the picture in focus, not just a face or central image.  In the same way it can refocus any plane in the image, allowing any part of the image to be in focus while others are not, and in almost true 3D fashion, the image viewpoint can also be changed, meaning that the image of a person can be rotated along with the background.
It doesn’t end there as a light-field camera can also create a depth image, remove the background from an image, and measure distance, all similar to what would now entail using a regular camera and a depth sensor, but understanding what a light-field camera can do needs some imagery.  The image below (Fig. 1) was taken with a light-field camera, and each of the individual images below (Fig . 2 – Fig 4.) are blowups of a particular portion of the 1st image.  Note that every pixel in all three images are in focus, something a normal camera would not be able to do, and after the image has been taken, the user can refocus any part of the image while blurring any other part. (Fig. 5), and while we cannot adequately show the camera’s ability to change perspective, we include a video below.  Background removal and/or substitution is also easy as the camera has captured far more data than normal, and can understand each depth ‘plane’ to remove the background, rather than use color or specific image shapes of guidelines to gauge where the background actually is (Fig. 6 & Fig. 7).
Such cameras are just beginning to reach commercial potential and we expect will make their way into high-end smartphones over the next few years as smartphone brands look for more ways to differentiate themselves from others and app developers better understand the capabilities of using this kind of information to enhance or modify images.  There are obvious uses in surveillance and law enforcement and certainly for professional photography, but while all of those applications allow costs to remain high, applications on consumer devices will bring the cost down far more quickly, but as the key to consumer demand will be applications, the need for developers to focus on more than filters and face changers is key to the technology’s development.  It’s a technology waiting for an application….
https://youtu.be/zHrd3ztHLpk

Lava International (pvt) is coming back.  The company, officially based in Noida, India, has been moving its operations back to its home country from China and other locations, and is soon to list its shares on one of the two principal exchanges in its home country.  Lava was a name to be reckoned with in the Indian smartphone market back in 2013, releasing 12 models that ranged from $207 to $49 in their home market and rising to a peak of 34 models in 2016, but competition from Chinese brands and Samsung (005930.KS) began to take its toll on the company, who moved its R&D, Design, and manufacturing operations overseas to more effectively compete.
Lava is now reviving its smartphone business and in January released its “MyZ” series of smartphones, which according to the company, is the world’s first fully customizable smartphone line, allowing the user to choose the front camera  rear camera, RAM, ROM, and color, and have the phone produced ‘just for you’..  That said, on an overall basis, the new line sports LCD displays from 7” down to 5”, running Mediatek’s (2454.TT) Helios G35 or A20 OS, and costing between $135 and $75 US, which is a bit below the 2020 average smartphone price in India of $156. 
While Lava has not seen its share of the Indian smartphone market above 1% over the last few years, the company expects to see a 5% share by the end of this year, likely more realistically possible after the IPO, which is expected to raise between $1.9b and $2b US.  The Indian government is also pushing to help local smartphone brands regain status, with government funding, and the bad border blood between India and China has helped Indian brands regain some relevance in the market over the last few quarters.  That said Fig. 2 shows 1Q composite brand share, which  includes only Chinese brands and Samsung and qualifying for government subsidies (Production Linked Incentives) means Lava must meet certain requirements to receive the benefits (3% to 6% of sales incentive for 5 years), which was the likely stimulus for the filing.
While the shares in Lava are unlisted, with the IPO filing set for June, there is a small unlisted share market for Lava which has seen the share price rise from ~₹200 (~$2.75) to ~₹400 ($5.50) since the company’s plans for the IPO began to be known.  Net profit margin for Lava (March year) has ranged from 3.68% to 1.43% (2019), but increased to 2.03% last year, although not surprisingly the promoters of the unlisted market consider the share undervalued on a market cap to revenue basis.