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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

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 the things in it." [1] It's amazing from a technical perspective, but the image resolution was low (only 4 MP), and the price was high ($1600). [2] I'd hoped that the technology would help the camera market find a new selling point to compete with phones, but apparently that hasn't happened. It's a pity that Lytro is disbanding instead of selling off to Canon or Nikon. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5949913/lytro-illum-review https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5949913/lytro-illum-revie... [2] https://petapixel.com/2017/01/12/look-lytro-illum-camera-future-failed/ https://petapixel.com/2017/01/12/look-lytro-illum-camera-fut...

kevingadd 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- danso 9y ago
  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 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.
  - acdha 9y ago
    > 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.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      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.., If you look at the 1990 circulation numbers, they are small for mid-sized cities, and even for large cities. The NY Times circulation was just over a million, there are hundreds of webpages with that kind of reach now. http://adage.com/images/random/0309/4-1990s-030909.pdf http://adage.com/images/random/0309/4-1990s-030909.pdf
  - vitovito 9y ago
dannyw 9y ago
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 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.
- knolan 9y ago
  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.
  - auvi 9y ago
    Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?
    - brian_herman 9y ago
      Yeah which dslr has this capability?
      - giobox 9y ago
        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-dual-pixel-raw-in-the-canon-5d-mark-iv/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/photographylife.com/what-is-dua...

kevingadd 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
danso 9y ago
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 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.
- acdha 9y ago
  > 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.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    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.., If you look at the 1990 circulation numbers, they are small for mid-sized cities, and even for large cities. The NY Times circulation was just over a million, there are hundreds of webpages with that kind of reach now. http://adage.com/images/random/0309/4-1990s-030909.pdf http://adage.com/images/random/0309/4-1990s-030909.pdf
- vitovito 9y ago

dannyw 9y ago

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 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.

knolan 9y ago
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.
- auvi 9y ago
  Just wondering, which DSLR in particular?
  - brian_herman 9y ago
    Yeah which dslr has this capability?
    - giobox 9y ago
      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-dual-pixel-raw-in-the-canon-5d-mark-iv/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/photographylife.com/what-is-dua...