The light field is a function that describes the amount of light travelling in every direction through every point in space. Michael Faraday was the first to propose (in an 1846 lecture entitled "Thoughts on Ray Vibrations") that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working for several years. The phrase light field was coined by Arun Gershun in a classic paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space (1936). The phrase has been redefined by researchers in computer graphics to mean something slightly different. To understand this difference, we'll need a bit of terminology.

If we restrict ourselves to geometric optics, i.e. to incoherent light and to objects larger than the wavelength of light, then the fundamental carrier of light is a ray. The measure for the amount of light traveling along a ray is radiance, denoted by L and measured in watts (W) per steradian (sr) per meter squared (m²). The steradian is a measure of solid angle, and meters squared are used here as a measure of cross-sectional area, as shown at right.

The radiance along all such rays in a region of three-dimensional space illuminated by an unchanging arrangement of lights is called the plenoptic function (Adelson 1991). Since rays in space can be parameterized by three coordinates, x, y, and z and two angles ${\displaystyle \theta }$ and ${\displaystyle \phi }$, as shown at left, it is a five-dimensional function. (One can consider time, wavelength, and polarization angle as additional variables, yielding higher-dimensional functions.)

Like Adelson, Gershun defined the light field at each point in space as a 5D function. However, he treated it as an infinite collection of vectors, one per direction impinging on the point, with lengths proportional to their radiances. Equivalently, one can imagine an infinite collection of infinitesimal surfaces placed at that point, one per direction, with different values of irradiance assigned to each surface.

Integrating these vectors over any collection of lights, or over the entire sphere of directions, produces a single scalar value - the total irradiance at that point, and a resultant direction. The figure at right, reproduced from Gershun's paper, shows this calculation for the case of two light sources. In computer graphics, this vector-valued function of 3D space is called the vector irradiance field (Arvo, 1994). The vector direction at each point in the field can be interpreted as the orientation one would face a flat surface placed at that point to most brightly illuminate it.

In a plenoptic function, if the region of interest contains a concave object (think of a cupped hand), then light leaving one point on the object may travel only a short distance before being blocked by another point on the object. No practical device could measure the function in such a region.

However, if we restrict ourselves to locations outside the convex hull (think shrink-wrap) of the object, then we can measure the plenoptic function easily using a digital camera. Moreover, in this case the function contains redundant information, because the radiance along a ray remains constant from point to point along its length, as shown at left. In fact, the redundant information is exactly one dimension, leaving us with a four-dimensional function. Parry Moon dubbed this function the photic field (1981), while researchers in computer graphics call it the 4D light field (Levoy 1996) or Lumigraph (Gortler 1996). Formally, the 4D light field is defined as radiance along rays in empty space.

The set of rays in a light field can be parameterized in a variety of ways, a few of which are shown below. Of these, the most common is the two-plane parameterization shown at right (below). While this parameterization cannot represent all rays, for example rays parallel to the two planes if the planes are parallel to each other, it has the advantage of relating closely to the analytic geometry of perspective imaging. Indeed, a simple way to think about a two-plane light field is as a collection of perspective images of the st plane (and any objects that may lie astride or beyond it), each taken from an observer position on the uv plane. A light field parameterized this way is sometimes called a light slab.

Light fields are a fundamental representation for light. As such, there are as many ways of creating light fields as there are computer programs capable of creating images or instruments capable of capturing them.

In computer graphics, light fields are typically produced either by rendering a 3D model or by photographing a real scene. In either case, to produce a light field views must be obtained for a large collection of viewpoints. Depending on the parameterization employed, this collection will typically span some portion of a line, circle, plane, sphere, or other shape, although unstructured collections of viewpoints are also possible (Buehler 2001).

Devices for capturing light fields photographically may include a moving handheld camera, a robotically controlled camera (Levoy, 2002) an arc of cameras (as in the bullet time effect used in The Matrix), a dense array of cameras (Kanade 1998; Yang 2002; Wilburn 2005), or a handheld camera (Ng 2005; Georgiev 2006), microscope (Levoy 2006), or other optical system in which an array of microlenses has been inserted in the optical path.

Computational imaging refers to any image formation method that involves a digital computer. Many of these methods operate at visible wavelengths, and many of those produce light fields. As a result, listing all applications of light fields would require surveying all uses of computational imaging - in art, science, engineering, and medicine. In computer graphics, some selected applications are: