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Decades from now people will be writing blog posts about how lytro was ahead of it's time.
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.
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.
The Lytro embeds, unlike physical media (negatives/photos that get lost) could still be revived if Lytro would open source the code. The existing embeds might be dysfunctional, but I would hope the media data could be mirrored (from the Lytro servers) and played via embeds hosted on any server. I'm guessing Lytro photos never reached critical mass for people to really call for this archival effort.
Don't acquihire-closure announcements usually say something like, "We're proud to be joining the great team at Google, who shares our passion/commitment for this technology and [vague promise that this will somehow, at some point, benefit customers of the now-dead company]". But this announcement simply says:
> "We’re excited to see what new opportunities the future brings for the Lytro team as we go our separate ways"
I guess that's the least awkward way to phrase the situation if only some of the team got acquihired by Google?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16705583
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17166038/lytro-light-fiel...
Oh wow! I had no idea anyone was actually making a digital lightfield camera, I thought sensor resolution was too small currently! It's a real shame they're shutting down but I guess there's no good way to view the images it captures. Decades from now people will be writing blog posts about how lytro was ahead of it's time.
But there's been very little information about how the acquisition fits into Google's strategy. I read somewhere that the Lytro staff that are brought across into Google will be dispersed across different departments. (obviously not everyone at Lytro was working directly on Lightfield technology but still...)
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…
- the camera itself crashes about once every couple of minutes, and that is not an exaggeration. You literally need to keep putting the battery out and back in, and that is not isolated: every reviewer also mentions the same.
- the software generates a depth map from the light-field image. This depth map is often generated wrong, with blotches of foreground content being treated as the background, and vice versa. You have to manually export the depthmap as a grayscale image, fix it up in Photoshop, and import it back.
- when you share the image on lytro.com, it compresses this image and breaks it up into a few layers (presumably for the JS viewer), which significantly degrades the quality of the image
- the perspective effect isn't real, and uses content aware fill. This means that there are serious visual artefacts with this feature.
The company wasn't making a lot of money and wasn't booming, otherwise it would not have been sold out, I reckon.