Editing Light field (section)

{{Short description|Vector function in optics}}
A '''light field''', or '''lightfield''', is a [[vector-valued function|vector function]] that describes the amount of [[light]] flowing in every direction through every point in a space. The space of all possible ''[[light rays]]'' is given by the [[Five-dimensional space|five-dimensional]] '''plenoptic function''', and the magnitude of each ray is given by its [[radiance]]. [[Michael Faraday]] was the first to propose that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Faraday|first1=Michael|date=30 April 2009|title=LIV. Thoughts on ray-vibrations|url=https://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wfarad1846.html|journal=Philosophical Magazine|series=Series 3|volume=28|issue=188|pages=345–350|doi=10.1080/14786444608645431|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130218141803/https://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wfarad1846.html|archivedate=2013-02-18|url-access=subscription}}</ref> The term ''light field'' was coined by [[Andrey Aleksandrovich Gershun|Andrey Gershun]] in a classic 1936 paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space.

The term "radiance field" may also be used to refer to similar, or identical <ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mildenhall |first=Ben |last2=Srinivasan |first2=Pratul P |last3=Tancik |first3=Matthew |last4=Barron |first4=Jonathan T |last5=Ramamoorthi |first5=Ravi |last6=Ng |first6=Ren |date=2021-12-17 |title=NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis |url=https://doi.org/10.1145/3503250 |journal=Communications of the ACM |volume=65 |issue=1 |pages=99-106}}</ref> concepts. The term is used in modern research such as [[neural radiance field]]s