Well interestingly I will most probably be taking a computational photography course this quarter taught by Mark Levoy in which we will use this camera. The possibilities that this type of a platform provides are really very interesting. While this is still a work in progress, there is actually a pretty well-defined road-map for its future development.
And it took a lot of effort since other than the development of hardware, they had to implement the complete image processing pipeline from scratch (including focusing algorithms, metering, jpeg engine etc). And the best part is that as part of the course we will be able to play with and modify all aspects of this pipeline (don't like the autofocus algorithm? - no problem implement your own!)
From the link above:
To create an open-source camera, Levoy and the group cobbled together a number of different parts: the motherboard, per se, is a Texas Instruments "system on a chip" running Linux with image and general processors and a small LCD screen. The imaging chip is taken from a Nokia N95 cell phone, and the lenses are off-the-shelf Canon lenses, but they are combined with actuators to give the camera its fine-tuned software control. The body is custom made at Stanford.
They have dubbed their creation "
Frankencamera" -- seems appropriate.