RIP
Lytro is winding down
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Lytro is winding down
#22I am not into photography, but the idea of Lytro fascinated me! I distinctly remember that when it was launched, there was a layperson explanation of the concept along the lines of, "take a photo as you would normally do and, later on, decide which area to focus on, which to blur, etc."
As the cliché goes, "don't cry because it ended; smile because it happened."
Re: Lytro is winding down
#23The 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 and software was also a buggy mess: - 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…
The two cameras I have, original and Illium were pretty stable. Very slow but I didn’t experience any crashing whatsoever.
Ultimately Lytro will be a footnote in camera history. We’re already seeing scaled back implementations in SLRs and smart phones.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#24I make lenticular artwork and owned a Lytro Illum before. The company was quite hostile after ending support for the camera, and refused to open source the web player, which was the only way you could make use of the living photos features and refocusing.
It is sad, because the Illum was a very well designed product and worked quite well for certain things. Unfortunately, Lytro was better at product design than business, and making the best feature of a $1500+ camera non-functional permanently was definitely a dick move.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#25Oh 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.
Sure, they made a good product and were ahead of their time, but software solutions for disparity maps are catching up. Light field arrays are very interesting science, and they definitely helped promote it, but as a business, well, they didn't treat their customers very well.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Media tries -- and is able -- to do a lot more than it did in the past. e.g. as terrible and annoying as linkrot is, most webpages are able to reach an audience far larger and far more disperse than what could be served by any library or printing press. Nevermind having the passive/latent feature of being cheaply and (hopefully) perpetually archived by services like Internet Archive. The Lytro embeds, unlike physical…
> most webpages are able to reach an audience far larger and far more disperse than what could be served by any library or printing press
Most webpages don’t have the reach of a mid-sized city newspaper in the 20th century. A few approach the reach of a major city newspaper, wire service like AP or Reuters, or radio/TV network – think about what percentage of the world could hear the BBC! Facebook or Google have those numbers but the vast majority of websites have far fewer visitors and less revenue per reader.
What’s different is that it’s much cheaper. You couldn’t run a printing faculty with a couple of people and laptops but a ton of websites do pull that off.
> The Lytro embeds, unlike physical media (negatives/photos that get lost) could still be revived
This leaves out a lot: if you have physical media, the risk is distributed and has been very well understood for centuries. If my house burns down, you don’t lose your family papers & photos. Important works are widely distributed and there’s rarely a single event which destroys all of them – even things like the Cultural Revolution didn’t manage 100% suppression.
Digital works are easier to make exact copies of but generally worse on every other aspect. In the case of a hosted service like Lytro, the complex proprietary stack is a huge risk but so is something as simple as archiving all of the data – if they’re doing any sort of on-demand loading you run the risk of only downloading the fraction of the data which displays initially without user interaction, and if they’re doing any sort of browser detection or rate-limiting you also have to be careful to deal with those. The web archiving community has years of experience with these kind of issues but it’s expensive and makes it hard for most people to archive their personal data.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#27I am not into photography, but the idea of Lytro fascinated me! I distinctly remember that when it was launched, there was a layperson explanation of the concept along the lines of, "take a photo as you would normally do and, later on, decide which area to focus on, which to blur, etc." As the cliché goes, "don't cry because it ended; smile because it happened."
If I paid that much money and now couldn't even look at all the photos I took, I might cry a little bit...
Maybe the photos are still viewable? There seems to be a bit of a controversy on that topic, but no one willing to say anything definite.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#28IIRC, 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 mention…
I thought that name sounded familiar. I really wanted one of those cameras when they came out, decided against when I saw all the software required to make it useful was closed. I had hoped they or someone else would release something but it never happened.
Re: Lytro is winding down
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The camera and software was also a buggy mess: - 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…
The two cameras I have, original and Illium were pretty stable. Very slow but I didn’t experience any crashing whatsoever. Ultimately Lytro will be a footnote in camera history. We’re already seeing scaled back implementations in SLRs and smart phones.
Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?
Re: Lytro is winding down
#30Last 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.
Since iOS 11 depth data is exposed in portrait photos allowing the focus point to be altered. It’s very effective.
You need an app though because it’s not possible in the Photos app (yet?) e.g. Focos