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Lytro is winding down

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Re: Lytro is winding down

#2

Post by peterburkimsher »

The Lytro Illum camera pioneered light-field photography.

"Instead of capturing it on a single plane, freezing an image in time and space, a light-field camera also captures the direction in which light was moving. Its processor then essentially renders a 3D scene, complete with the knowledge of distance between objects. A light-field photo represents not only everything in the scene, but a spatial understanding of the things in it." [1]

It's amazing from a technical perspective, but the image resolution was low (only 4 MP), and the price was high ($1600). [2]

I'd hoped that the technology would help the camera market find a new selling point to compete with phones, but apparently that hasn't happened. It's a pity that Lytro is disbanding instead of selling off to Canon or Nikon.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5949913/lytro-illum-revie...

[2] https://petapixel.com/2017/01/12/look-lytro-illum-camera-fut...

Re: Lytro is winding down

#5

Post by kevingadd »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #2

The Lytro Illum camera pioneered light-field photography. "Instead of capturing it on a single plane, freezing an image in time and space, a light-field camera also captures the direction in which light was moving. Its processor then essentially renders a 3D scene, complete with the knowledge of distance between objects. A light-field photo represents not only everything in the scene, but a spatial understanding of t…

Pretty wild to click through to the Verge review and all the photo embeds are dead because they were using Lytro's services. Media is so short-lived these days.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#7

Post by erric »

helb wrote: post #3

Last week on HN: "Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16635676 )

So Google didn’t buy them? This always struck me as a tech Apple would want in their phones, at 4MB though, apparently not.

Also for a very large company, $40 million isn’t a lot.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#8

Post by danso »

IIRC, Lytro photos required special software (Flash/JS embed) in order to provide interactive exploration of the light field data. But looks like the specially hosted site, pictures.lytro.com, was shut down back in November 2017 [0], leaving users without a way to demonstrate the "Living Picture" functionality other than using the Lytro Desktop software, then exporting to GIF/MOV [1]. Anyone know if Lytro has mentioned plans to open source the format/software? I see they have a Github org with a bunch of repos, but most of it looks like forked libs and things related to devops: https://github.com/lytro

[0] https://support.lytro.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001259712

[1] https://support.lytro.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002733832

Re: Lytro is winding down

#10

Post by [deleted] »

kevingadd wrote: post #5
peterburkimsher wrote: post #2

The Lytro Illum camera pioneered light-field photography. "Instead of capturing it on a single plane, freezing an image in time and space, a light-field camera also captures the direction in which light was moving. Its processor then essentially renders a 3D scene, complete with the knowledge of distance between objects. A light-field photo represents not only everything in the scene, but a spatial understanding of t…

Pretty wild to click through to the Verge review and all the photo embeds are dead because they were using Lytro's services. Media is so short-lived these days.

[deleted]
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