A camera that allows you to snap the shot anytime and worry about focusing it later, and that automatically records true 3D-compatible images? It sounds like twenty-first century technology to me. 🙂

In fact, it sounds very much like the 3D imaging technology described in Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, that allowed detective Elijah Bailey to see the critical clue in police recordings of the original murder scene long after the scene itself was cleaned up. All it might take is several of these around the perimeter of the room, and some as-yet-to-be-invented way to project the result and easily focus on whatever you want in it — all things that I suspect are well within our capabilities even today, now that we’ve got a way to record the data.

And once we’ve got that, what’s to stop us from making true 3D movies — not movies you just watch in pseudo-3D, but that are “surround-sight” as well as surround-sound, and truly 3D-interactive?

The future is bright… and easily refocused. 😉