Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lytro is winding down

support.lytro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Lytro is winding down

#31

Post by throwwit »

dannyw wrote: post #19
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…

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…

It’d be interesting to see an implementation with time-of-flight, the precision of surface mapping could only go up. Even combining an SLR improves resolution [ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/192f/708e0470744667f8fc5f41... ]

Re: Lytro is winding down

#32

Post by brian_herman »

auvi wrote: post #29
knolan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah which dslr has this capability?

Re: Lytro is winding down

#34

Post by giobox »

brian_herman wrote: post #32
auvi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?

Yeah which dslr has this capability?

It’s not _exactly_ the same as how the Lytro worked, but you can achieve a small degree of fixing focus in post with the data captured on any of Canon’s newish “Dual Pixel AF” sensors that are increasingly found in their DSLRs. The technique is not a million miles away from what lytro did, in that there are effectively two photosites at each pixel measuring the light hitting it at slightly different angles, which is what gives the ability to fix minor focus issues in Canon’s own RAW processor. The feature isn’t supported that widely in third party RAW converters yet though.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/photographylife.com/what-is-dua...

Re: Lytro is winding down

#35

Post by anentropic »

auvi wrote: post #29
knolan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it's not a DSLR, but some recent Panasonic mirrorless cameras have this https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/feature/post...

Re: Lytro is winding down

#36

Post by _pmf_ »

danso wrote: post #16

Anyone know whether this turned out to be an acquihire or not? Previous discussion [0] and articles [1] said Lytro was being acquihired by several of Google teams. But no exact price was mentioned ($25 to $40M). 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 s…

> Anyone know whether this turned out to be an acquihire or not?

I suspect a pure patent acquisition.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#37

Post by sleepybrett »

ipsum2 wrote: post #12
erric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a acquihire. Buy the talent, kill the company.

The reports I heard is 'buy 30% of the talent'

Re: Lytro is winding down

#38

Post by ISL »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #28
danso wrote: post #8

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 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.

Same here. It was the lack of an open format that stopped me from pursuing it further.

The Lytro founder's Ph.D thesis is extremely well written and informative on lightfield imaging as a whole.

Thank you, Lytro, for existing and showing us a new way forward. May the patents be licensed easily to keep the ball rolling!

Re: Lytro is winding down

#39

Post by vitovito »

danso wrote: post #8

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 mention…

Lytro had announced at one point plans to open-source their viewer, but that never happened: https://web.archive.org/web/20180327231606/https://www.lytro...

As far as I've been able to tell, their hosting service generated online viewers and embeds server-side, rather than their desktop software generating it and uploading it to pictures.lytro, Facebook, or 500px (the supporting services). It won't even let you do that kind of export without logging into api.lytro.com first. (Their Desktop 5 software is a .NET app if anyone wants to try poking at it.)

After their hosting service shut down last year, I crawled every embed the Internet Archive had, and downloaded the additional JSON and JPEG assets necessary to restore the embeds. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Lytro

Those were eventually added, so now any embeds the Wayback had before the shutdown should work again, e.g. http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5949913/lytro-illum-review v. https://web.archive.org/web/20170317183900/http://www.thever...

It's unclear whether all the Lytro file formats (including their later standard "XRAW") have any sort of documentation. The earlier formats (from their pre-Illum camera) do, e.g. https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools but not the later formats, which include camera calibration data.

The viewers on GitHub, e.g. https://github.com/damienfir/lytrogl and https://github.com/behnam/php-lytro are only for their earlier formats.

Re: Lytro is winding down

#40

Post by eecsninja »

I got an offer from Lytro in 2012 but I turned it down to stay at Google, where I still work.

At the time, I considered Lytro because it had real, substantial technology behind it, and was not just some trivial social networking app. I turned it down because assuming a $1B exit, my shares would still not have been that much more than what I got from Google. Six years later, I am doing much better (more earnings, more vacation, and probably better work/life balance) than if I had joined Lytro.

Although I made the right decision in hindsight, I think about how things might have been different if I had accepted that offer. It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies.

Post reply on HN