I have been interested in this technology since I first heard of it a couple of years ago, I'm glad to hear that development is going well.

Depth of field limits nearly all cameras' abilities to focus on a subject. If a camera's lens has a wide aperture, it can take in a great deal of light but it has a narrow depth of field, limiting the range in which it can focus on a subject. If a camera has a very narrow aperture, it can have a larger depth of field, but it takes in much less light and is less suited for shooting in low light. Adobe is working on changing that entire system, by using a completely different lens design than linear arrays of glass components.  
  

The idea is that Adobe's plenoptic lens system can potentially capture a limitless depth of field. Here's how it works. 
 

A plenoptic lens is a system of many small lens elements in an array, like an insect's compound eyes. Each sub-lens refracts far more information than the same amount of space could on a single lens. The resulting image the sensor captures is a strange mosaic pattern of several tiny images, each holding a chunk of the picture as a whole. Using special image processing software, that mosaic can be translated into a single clear picture, where the focal point is entirely dependent on what parts of the image data the user wants to process. After the shot is taken, the user can focus on the background, on the foreground, or on any subject in-frame. 



Tovor Gregoriev, one of the researchers at Adobe exploring plenoptic lenses, notes that a plenoptic camera is available on the market. Dutch company Raytrix produces a line of high-end plenoptic cameras. However, they're very specialized devices, and can only produce finished pictures at up to 3 megapixels depending on the model. For plenoptic photography to become widespread, the technology will have to become miniaturized to be feasible on an SLR body, and the image processing software will have to be built into the camera itself. Until then, it's just a fascinating piece of potential future technology.  

http://www.tested.com/news/adobe-bug-eyed-plenoptic-lenses-can-focus-after-the-shot/1008/

Amazing, but making the tiny lenses suitable for high res and high quality won't be easy, the suitable machinery to grind them will have to be devised, perfected and then finely tuned during actual production.

But the individual images themselves don't have to be particularly high resolution to create high resolution images ...

In university one of my friends created what he called a stutter camera. Essentially, he took a very low resolution web-camera, hooked it up to a bunch of motors, and by slightly turning and rotating the camera and blending the images together he was able to make a much higher resolution image. His application was only suitable for still images but conceptually it isn't that much different for what would be required here.

Any details on price of this toy?

that's pretty cool.  good post!

at this time probably in the tens if not hundreds of thousands...

It won't work!

what won't?

True, but they cannot be glass bottoms either, and grinding hundreds or thousands tiny lenses can share only a part of the tech used to grind single ones, the current lathes used for single lenses would need heavy modifications. However, from what I read on Wiki, currently the resolution is quite low, what they are experimenting them for are different issues, mainly involving motion pictures, not static ones.

I have found an interesting article on this matter of bug eye lens:

http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/042005/Telescopes_make_bug-eye_optics_042005.html

It seems it turns out cheaper and way more reliable to produce high quality pics with lens like this rather than being improving on old school lens.