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Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

techcrunch.com

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Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#71

Post by owenversteeg »

Stratoscope wrote: post #21
bwang29 wrote: post #6

Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop so…

I discovered Lytro at the Maker Faire when they had their "borrow a Lytro" demo. It was a great bit of marketing: take a Lytro around the Faire for an hour (where are there are always plenty of interesting subjects) and afterward they put all your shots in an online gallery for you. I got a fun shot or two that day and promptly bought one of their first cameras. But it wasn't a very good camera, and they completely m…

Do you still have the photo? I'd be curious to see it!

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#72

Post by acct1771 »

Stratoscope wrote: post #21
bwang29 wrote: post #6

Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop so…

I discovered Lytro at the Maker Faire when they had their "borrow a Lytro" demo. It was a great bit of marketing: take a Lytro around the Faire for an hour (where are there are always plenty of interesting subjects) and afterward they put all your shots in an online gallery for you. I got a fun shot or two that day and promptly bought one of their first cameras. But it wasn't a very good camera, and they completely m…

> The pitch at the time was "you can put your photos on lytro.com, and people who view your gallery can click anywhere to refocus!" But who wants to do that?

JFK assassination researchers.

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#73

Post by kypro »

neves wrote: post #68
neves wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me reasoning of the deal? It looks to me more some kind of Silicon Valley brotherhood deal. Sure 40m to Google is change money, but it is a failed company and they could duplicate the tech with far less.

Maybe it is the 59 patents...

The fact many of the employees seem to have been given severance would imply that to me.

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#74

Post by owenversteeg »

rjth wrote: post #59
Deimorz wrote: post #50

If you have a VR headset, I highly suggest trying out the "Welcome to Light Fields" demo that Google released on Steam last week (it's free): http://store.steampowered.com/app/771310/Welcome_to_Light_Fi... It's absolutely incredible and seems like really promising technology. Even with the relatively low resolution of current headsets, the image quality is amazing and you can see some slight lighting changes as you m…

As someone who has been working with stereo 180 videos in VR for the past few months, this technology makes such a huge difference. While stereo photography looks broken from most angles, Google's lightfields demo just felt natural. Honestly, one of the best VR experiences I've tried in a while.

Huh, that'd certainly explain why Google wanted to pay $40MM for it. Thanks!

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#75

Post by Jtsummers »

m3kw9 wrote: post #70

This tells me the tech isn’t too useful from the price and from the buyer and the amount of time it took to get a sale on that price. That’s beside the fact that it does this selective focus thing which should be automatic anyways or selected during the shot.

Along with selective focus (which struck me as gimmicky) you do get 3d images from a single sensor with better detail than a stereoscopic setup (2x standard cameras). This is useful for computational work as you can get better spatial data from one source or if you add multiple sensors you can get even more improvement.

I always figured this would be used in a fashion similar to synthetic aperture radar, but using image data, and applied to autonomous vehicles and similar applications. It's better than edge detection from a standard single sensor. And you have more to train your algorithms on since they can recognize what is an actual object more easily versus what is an image of an object.

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#76

Post by owenversteeg »

modeless wrote: post #36
cmac2992 wrote: post #3

Awesome. After playing with Google's go pro light field images, it's really hard to go back and enjoy regular 360 photos. The quality and 6dof sense of presence. was amazing. Hopefully the addition of lytros tech makes it even better.

These are the mentioned light field images: https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/experimenting-lig... They can only be experienced properly with a positionally tracked VR headset, but they are extremely cool if you have one.

HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets... and it seems like Windows Mixed Reality headsets are available for around $200 on Amazon. Wow, we live in the future. I guess the main cost here is the PC attached to them... probably costs about $500 minimum if I'd have to guess for something with the specs required.

[edit] wow, you can get an Asus pre-built desktop for $440, damn! i5-7400, 12gb DDR4, 2TB HDD, graphics good enough for VR... wow. Anyone know if it's possible to build your own for a competitive price, or if that'd drive up the cost? I remember the days when it was cheaper to build your own...

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#79

Post by Jtsummers »

mseebach wrote: post #77

I tried to click around on Lytro's website, but it left me pretty baffled. What the f... is it?

Lytro makes light field cameras. A single sensor can be used to capture enough information to do a lot of computational imagery work like the somewhat gimmicky example of changing focus. But you also have enough data to do things like accurately apply filters to parts of an image based on depth information. A good simulation of viewing the image through caustics or other distortion effects. And, to me the most interesting, reconstruct 3d information from a single sensor.

Downsides, a 16 megapixel sensor only got something like 4 megapixel of image resolution because of how much data has to be captured for the light field. So consumer grade sensors resulted in (by contemporary standards) very low resolution images. And all those neat effects weren't really available, except maybe to their commercial partners (later products and services).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera

Re: Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

#80

Post by PaulHoule »

StavrosK wrote: post #65
KaiserPro wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stereo cameras only give two viewpoints, it requires a lot of processing power to re-create the 3d scene. a lightfield gives you much more information making reconstruction much simpler. You can also see past occlusions, something not possible with stereo.

How can you see past occlusions?

A stereo camera array can see past occlusions in the sense that some things are occluded to one camera but not to another.

With a larger and more distributed camera array, cameras could be pointed everywhere so that every point in the field has a certain level of coverage.

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