Whatever happened to Lytro?

[StewartR]

Remember the revolutionary light-field camera? Turns out there's no consumer demand for it. So the company has changed its focus (see what I did there?) to VR applications for Hollywood studios.

Here's an explanation from the CEO Jason Rosenthal:
https://backchannel.com/war-stories-why-i-lit-up-lytro-b46124da32a6#.dvmmo77kz

 

[viewfromthenorth]

I once saw lytro described as a solution looking for a problem. If I could be bothered reading to the end of that dissertation I'm sure I'd find out if they found one. I lost interest when the author started going through his past career highlights.

 

[StewartR]

I once saw lytro described as a solution looking for a problem.

My thoughts exactly.

 

[pjm1]

I once saw lytro described as a solution looking for a problem.

To be fair, if you've seen half of my attempts at locking focus, you'll see it's a solution to a very real problem

 

[Jayst84]

Does seem suited to (or even a requirement of) VR.

All the new phones this year are going to be featuring dual lens, dual sensor cameras. Huawei just released one with depth mapping, and software to allow 'refocusing' post-capture. Things might move along again when everyone has one in their pocket and can play with the technology for 'free' - (or when Apple catch up at the end of the year, and everyone thinks they've just invented the wheel).

 

[HoppyUK]

It was never going to fly as a consumer product, and the whole thing was based on a flawed concept - see founder Ren Ng's universtily dissertation from 2006 https://s3.amazonaws.com/lytro-corp-assets/renng-thesis.pdf

I can't help thinking that actually the Lytro team was mainly interested in creating marketing hype and buzz, so they could flog it to some big corporation and pocket a few $m. They made great play of presenting to tech industry nobles like Steve Jobs, but failed to learn from the fact that they all said no!

On the other hand, it surely has some very valuable industrial applications?

 

[Ed Sutton]

I don't care what happened to Lytro. Whatever happened to the Likely Lads?

 

[TrainMan]

Huawei just released one with depth mapping, and software to allow 'refocusing' post-capture. Things might move along again when everyone has one in their pocket and can play with the technology for 'free' - (or when Apple catch up at the end of the year, and everyone thinks they've just invented the wheel).

My HTC M8 has had this since October 2014. I played with it a few times then never used it again, it's just a gimmick IMO.

 

[juggler]

Remember the revolutionary light-field camera? Turns out there's no consumer demand for it. So the company has changed its focus (see what I did there?) to VR applications for Hollywood studios.

Here's an explanation from the CEO Jason Rosenthal:
https://backchannel.com/war-stories-why-i-lit-up-lytro-b46124da32a6#.dvmmo77kz

As part of that it's producing a 755 mpx 300fps monster

 

[Jayst84]

My HTC M8 has had this since October 2014. I played with it a few times then never used it again, it's just a gimmick IMO.

The tech will keep improving though. And get it in the hands of a few tens of millions more people, and someone is bound to start doing interesting things with it.

 

[frod]

The tech will keep improving though. And get it in the hands of a few tens of millions more people, and someone is bound to start doing interesting things with it.

Yep, I really hope that one day my phone is good enough to make camera purchasing irrelevant. Of course a lot of the tech will benefit cameras as well but the software side of things is rapidly leaving traditional cameras in the dust.

 

[Alastair]

Remember the revolutionary light-field camera?

There's one turned up on the shelf in my local CEX, but it has to be a uniquely uninteresting technology because I'm struggling to find any corner of the internet where anyone's found something useful to do with it or has hacked it into something interesting.

 

[Cuchulainn]

They've opened the api so that people can mess around with it, but it's a bit of a compromise too far in terms of effective focal length and so on for some of the off the wall applications. For example, there's a lot of interest in light field cameras in microscopy and when wex were selling their stock off last year i looked into getting one for work. However it would have both reduced the resolution of our microscopes unecessarily and vignetted terribly.

 

[Tobers]

I think they have moved on to high end commercial video cameras for the film industry, where things like post-shot focusing could come in extremely handy.