Light Field Technology Induced Variable Depth of Field for the Enhancement of Photography Learning

While learning photography, learners, especially beginners usually encounter difficulties, such as realizing the depth of fields (DoFs) and/or selecting a good shooting angle. The emergence of Light Field Technology (LFT) offers a new possibility to address the above problems. The unique imaging principle of LFT enables the reconstruction of the scene to be captured with dynamic visual effects including dynamic depth of focus and dynamic viewing parallax. In photography, the dynamic depth of focus by LFT can be utilized to simulate the variable DoFs and the dynamic viewing parallax can be employed to simulate alternative shooting angles. In this research, we established a virtual environment for photography learning by utilizing the above-mentioned dynamic visual effects with real-time gesture interaction. A user study was conducted to evaluate the learning efficiency of the learners in our virtual learning environment, the results reveal that these learners show higher learning efficiency than the learners in the control group.