The soon-to-be-available Lytro camera allows picture taking without focusing. The photos can be focused later by simply clicking on any part of the image to bring that area into primary focus. It’s a pretty historic achievement in photography. I don’t think anyone has done it before.

The camera uses something called a light field sensor. It captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light. So you can snap a picture without focusing at all and then later focus the image the way you want to.

Try clicking around on these images: