>>4136688>>4136761>A single image can not be captured in 3d. >A lens, AKA a single eye, can not capture an image in 3d.I worked in research at a microscope manufacturer and this is wrong, we had no issues capturing depth information and creating 3D images from a single lens. Astigmatism shape and intensity depends on distance to the focus plane, so if you know the relationship you may invert the function to retrieve depth. I suppose it is conceptually similar to DFD but using different optical functions for the same effect, and contrary to DFD this became an industry standard. You can look up point spread function engineering for additional information.
Of course this is only relevant to extreme microphotography as most posters here are too poor to afford a $100K+ confocal microscope (with 10K super apochromatic lenses and 10K annual service contract).
For familiar human scale subjects, parallax depth perception is unnecessary to have a sense of depth since we already have strong priors anyway. This is why some photographers play artistically with scale and perspective to confuse these priors.
