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Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

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Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#51

Post by eyesee »

matsemann wrote: post #31

> Killer feature of this new technology was the ability to refocus the image after it was taken! (...), the camera was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist A related camera technology, but which I've found great to use, is 360 cameras. The ability to re-frame (not focus) the image as I want in post is so great. No longer do I have to spend many attempts positioning a camera perfect, just shoot and later "point…

I worked on 360 cameras / software for many years. Looking forward to the day when an article like this comes out for one of the products I worked on.

When you’re in the heart of it it’s so easy to take pride in the technical challenges you’ve overcome, but completely miss the realities of the marketplace.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#52

Post by ladberg »

worldmerge wrote: post #12

Very cool! Would it be possible to use this for NeRFs? I’m very new to them but it seems like they use light data heavily, at least it seems Luma AI does.

I'm not sure if you're already aware of the connection, but the founder of Lytro (Ren Ng) was actually the advisor on the original NeRF paper! I took a graphics class from him in college and it was one of my favorite classes. In addition to the course material it was great to hear about what his lab was working on and future moonshot projects.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#53

Post by jbandela1 »

GeompMankle wrote: post #39
jbandela1 wrote: post #38

On a side note, do you think think type of light field photography could be packaged in a phone camera? Right now we have multiple lenses sticking out the back of the phone. Could we replace all that with just a single large light sensor?

If I correctly interpreted your question as ending in "a single large light[field] sensor], no. Light field cameras take a single field of view and overall entrance pupil and then, given that field of view, they trade resolution for being able to specifically note which part of the entrance pupil saw the object in that low resolution way. As a person who specializes in physical optics rather than computational optics…

Thank you for your detailed answer.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#54

Post by sedivy94 »

I was just thinking about Lytro the other day... I was quite young but very excited by the prospect of that technology. I know computational photography and AI have done more for cameras in the past decade, but I'm still hopeful there's a paradigm-shattering advancement in sensor tech.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#56

Post by gumby »

fhars wrote: post #33
weinzierl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just performing predictable mathematical transformations" Just linear algebra, to be precise. A lens is just a matrix and rays are simply vectors. Combining lenses is merely matrix multiplication and complex optical systems can be represented by the result, which is a plain simple matrix again. The Eigenvalues tell you interesting properties of your optical system. I've always enjoyed this part of physics because it…

Well, sort of... there goes quite a bit of materials science and engineering into making and shaping the glass of a lens to make it behave like a matrix (i.e. to extend the range in which this linear approximation to the actual behavior of a blob of glass is valid).

It sure does. But if you can replace many of the lenses with computation it's a big win. If you can compensate for some of the inherent aberration in a lens design, or specific manufacturing variation in a lens, its an even bigger win.

In other words, one does not obviate the other.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#57

Post by gumby »

I'm really surprised that LF cameras haven't been added to any phones. I'd think it would be valuable for "fixing" photos and perhaps allow computation to replace the LIDAR.

Though it feels like the cameras are in a "pro" or at least "prosumer" race. Every apple camera announcement seems to tout "advances" that are mostly irrelevant to me (who, like I assume most people, pretty much only uses the camera to take pictures of people and pets).

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#58

Post by gommm »

seszett wrote: post #20

I've been intrigued by this camera ever since it came out but I had not checked eBay for a long time so I was surprised to see "$20 to $40" mentioned there. Well, the cheapest one is actually $200 as far as I can see, showing results worldwide.

Yup, same here :(

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#59

Post by oofbey »

carlosdp wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #4

Ooooh I have an original Lytro and of course it just sits there. I am going to have to try this! By the way don't miss this video about the failed 755 megapixel 300fps Lytro Cinema camera, a contraption the size of a car with off the charts data storage requirements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfjYecJHMRU

What's wild is that it turns out we were only a few years away from technology that could completely replace the purpose of the cinema camera, with off the shelf GPUs on a normal desktop (NeRFs)

NeRFs are cool and someday will do what the Lytro cinema camera claimed. But today it’s nowhere close. See how Lytro took 10 years to go from lab science to a cinema quality camera. NeRFs have a similar journey ahead of them. Today they kinda mostly sorta work in the lab.

Re: Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

#60

Post by kridsdale1 »

gumby wrote: post #57

I'm really surprised that LF cameras haven't been added to any phones. I'd think it would be valuable for "fixing" photos and perhaps allow computation to replace the LIDAR. Though it feels like the cameras are in a "pro" or at least "prosumer" race. Every apple camera announcement seems to tout "advances" that are mostly irrelevant to me (who, like I assume most people, pretty much only uses the camera to take pictu…

The latest iPhones fake this in Cinematic filming mode. They use depth info and a long depth of field, then apply a distance based Gaussian blur to fake a shallow DOF in post. But you can go back and edit footage, selecting other subjects than what was “focused on” during filming.
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