Stanford electronics researchers are building a camera with thousands of tiny lenses that could make a 3D electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture.

The “multi-aperture image sensor” has 0.7-microns pixels grouped in arrays of 256 pixels each, with a lens on top of each array, resulting in 12,616 “cameras” on the chip.

A depth-information camera could be used for robotics, biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings. Knowing the exact distance to an object might give robots better spatial vision than humans and allow them to perform delicate tasks now beyond their abilities.