so this is like use of (in a different species) light sensitive patches of skin instead of the eye balls (lenses) that most animals on earth evolved ?

interesting.

even if this does not immediately replace traditional cameras and lenses... I am wondering if this can add a complementary set of capabilities to a traditional camera say next to a phone's camera bump/island/cluster...so that we can drive some enhanced use cases

maybe store the wider context in raw format alongside the EXIF data ...so that future photo manipulation models can use that ambient data to do more realistic edits / in painting / out painting etc?

I am thinking this will benefit 3D photography and video graphics a lot if you can capture more of the ambient data, not strictly channeled through the lenses