The Stanford Light Field Project is investigating techniques for representing environments and objects as a "light field" -- i.e. the flow of light through space. In the absence of occluders, we can represent this light field as a 4D function of position and direction. This leads to an efficient algorithm for image-based rendering. For an introduction to light fields, see Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan, Light Field Rendering, Proc. SIGGRAPH '96. The slides from the SIGGRAPH '96 talk are now online, too.
LightPack is available for research and commercial use, free of charge, as described at the bottom of this web page. The available software consists of a real-time viewer for light fields (click on lifview below) and an authoring kit for making your own light fields from arrays of images (click on lifauth). These are available in binary form (so far only for SGIs and PCs) and as source code (click on lifsource). We also have an archive of pre-computed light fields (click on lifs). Finally, if you don't want to download our viewer, we have some MPEGs demonstrating an interactive session with our viewer (click on mpegs).
During the period 1995-2007, this software was covered by the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory's custom-written General Software License. For downloads beginning on August 23, 2007, this software is covered by a new General Software License, which is based on the BSD license.
lightpack-question at graphics dot stanford dot edu
Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory