You may be pleased with the camera technology in your latest smartphone, which can recognise your face  and take slow-mo video in ultra-high definition, but these technological feats are just the start of a larger revolution.

The latest camera research is shifting away from increasing the number of megapixels towards fusing camera data with computational processing. By that, we don't mean the Photoshop style of processing where effects and filters are added to a picture, but rather a radical new approach where the incoming data may not actually look like at an image at all. It only becomes an image after a series of computational steps that often involve complex mathematics and modelling how light travels through the scene or the camera.

This additional layer of processing magically frees us from the chains of conventional imaging techniques. One day we may not even need cameras in the conventional sense any more. Instead we will use light detectors that only a few years ago we would never have considered any use for imaging.