Still in their infancy, ‘light field’ cameras produce high quality visual content enabling users to retrospectively choose from different focal points, different depths of field, different half-stops, and so on. But there are a number of scientific challenges owing to the dimensionality and complexity of the data. Created as part of the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme, Plenoptima is an innovative training network that is currently introducing the first 15 researchers from the next generation to this emerging technology. Inria is one of five partners comprising the academic core of the project.