Deep in the bowels of Stanford University in California, a monster is being brought to life, not – for once – by a mad scientist playing God, but by a computer scientist, Professor Marc Levoy, and his team. Made from the spare parts of the photographic industry bolted on to a powerful computer, the Frankencamera may be incredibly ugly, but it will be the world's first open-source camera.

By giving researchers, programmers and the curious who buy the almost-£600 Frankencamera control for the first time over all the functions of a camera, Professor Levoy hopes those users will develop, as with the iPhone, the innovative ideas and applications necessary for the next revolution in photography: computational photography. That is the coming revolution that few people have heard of.

"Computational photography will change how we do photography," says the Professor of Computer Science. "It should allow you to fix things that you can't currently – whether by combining pictures in a different way, or by fiddling with optics so that more is recorded than on a normal camera; basically to do what photoshop can do, but the moment you take the photograph."

And so the only angry mob the Frankencamera will meet will be the photo fans desperate to get their hands on it.