Techno.

The technological transitions that fascinate me are one side of the process. Peoples use of images is what is going to define them beyond the current paradigm of Photography.
Computational Photography i suppose can be said to be a branch of photography that is primarily research based. Its more the science of image creation. Most of the research has obvious commercial applications and can be placed in the context of photographic progression, like increses in quality and automation. But the field also offers an insight beyond the commercial, and insight into the changes at the core of the medium.
In terms of creating images with extended depth of Field their are several notable methods that mostly rely on encoding additional data into the image for post processing. These manifest themselves as a mixture of hardware modification and software.There is a passing similarity to Dolby and the methods employed to transpose the audio signal into the optimum frequency range of a given tape or RIAA tone curves that perform a similar task on vinyl.
Accept these modern methods of encoding create additional data that can be used to manipulate the image. This video is a reasonably comprehensive overview of the key methods involved.

This work from Stanford using a large array of cameras is just amazing. Im particularly impressed by the Synthetic Aperture video near the end.
EDIT: As per request. A link to a hi-res version of this video