I believe the lytro camera was a plenoptic, or light field, camera. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity together with the direction of light emanating from a scene. Conventional cameras record only light intensity at various wavelengths.
While conventional cameras capture a single high-resolution focal plane and light field cameras sacrifice resolution to "re-focus" via software after the fact, the CMU Split-Lohmann camera provides a middle ground, using an adaptive computational lens to physically focus every part of the image independently. This allows it to capture a "deep-focus" image where objects at multiple distances are sharp simultaneously, maintaining the high resolution of a conventional camera while achieving the depth flexibility of a light field camera without the blur or data loss.
Something I find interesting is that while holograms and the CMU camera both manipulate the "phase" of light, they do so for opposite reasons: a hologram records phase to recreate a 3D volume, whereas the CMU camera modulates phase to fix a 2D image.
I remember Lytro. There was a lot of fanfare behind that company and then they fizzled. They had a lauded CEO/founder and their website demonstrated clearly how the post-focus worked. It felt like they were going to be the next camera revolution. Their rise and demise story would make a good Isaacson-style documentary.
If I recall correctly they got scooped up by Google and their team was merged into various Google teams. I was disappointed to hear of their fizzling as well. They were just starting to dive into serious movie production light field cameras when it happened. They had an incredible tech demo on their website showcasing its power. I can't seem to locate the original but there are bits of it in the linked video.
I think the product was just too early for its time, and there is not much demand for it.
For what it's worth, the founder (Ren Ng) went back to academia, and was highly instrumental in computer vision research, e.g. being the PI on the paper for NeRF: (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3503250)
I don't think it was quite too early, it just makes tradeoffs that are undesirable.
Lytro as I understand it, trades a huge amount of resolution for the focusing capability. Some ridiculous amount, like the user gets to see just 1/8th of the pixels on the sensor.
In a way, I'd say rather than too early it was too late. Because autofocus was already quite good and getting better. You don't need to sacrifice all that resolution when you can just have good AF to start with. Refocusing in post is a very rare need if you got the focus right initially.
And time has only made that even worse. Modern autofocus is darn near magic, and people love their high resolution photos.
I believe the lytro camera was a plenoptic, or light field, camera. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity together with the direction of light emanating from a scene. Conventional cameras record only light intensity at various wavelengths.
While conventional cameras capture a single high-resolution focal plane and light field cameras sacrifice resolution to "re-focus" via software after the fact, the CMU Split-Lohmann camera provides a middle ground, using an adaptive computational lens to physically focus every part of the image independently. This allows it to capture a "deep-focus" image where objects at multiple distances are sharp simultaneously, maintaining the high resolution of a conventional camera while achieving the depth flexibility of a light field camera without the blur or data loss.
Something I find interesting is that while holograms and the CMU camera both manipulate the "phase" of light, they do so for opposite reasons: a hologram records phase to recreate a 3D volume, whereas the CMU camera modulates phase to fix a 2D image.
Interesting. So if I understand correctly, it's like a nonlinear version of a "tilt lens"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt%E2%80%93shift_photography...
I remember Lytro. There was a lot of fanfare behind that company and then they fizzled. They had a lauded CEO/founder and their website demonstrated clearly how the post-focus worked. It felt like they were going to be the next camera revolution. Their rise and demise story would make a good Isaacson-style documentary.
If I recall correctly they got scooped up by Google and their team was merged into various Google teams. I was disappointed to hear of their fizzling as well. They were just starting to dive into serious movie production light field cameras when it happened. They had an incredible tech demo on their website showcasing its power. I can't seem to locate the original but there are bits of it in the linked video.
https://youtu.be/4qXE4sA-hLQ?si=QsEG2PtAmVjIfwDA
I think the product was just too early for its time, and there is not much demand for it. For what it's worth, the founder (Ren Ng) went back to academia, and was highly instrumental in computer vision research, e.g. being the PI on the paper for NeRF: (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3503250)
I don't think it was quite too early, it just makes tradeoffs that are undesirable.
Lytro as I understand it, trades a huge amount of resolution for the focusing capability. Some ridiculous amount, like the user gets to see just 1/8th of the pixels on the sensor.
In a way, I'd say rather than too early it was too late. Because autofocus was already quite good and getting better. You don't need to sacrifice all that resolution when you can just have good AF to start with. Refocusing in post is a very rare need if you got the focus right initially.
And time has only made that even worse. Modern autofocus is darn near magic, and people love their high resolution photos.
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Light field cameras are mentioned under "related work":
https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/svaf/static/pdfs/Spatially_Varyin...
The article mentions a spatial light modulator, which I believe the Lytro camera did not have.
The image(s) were also trash unfortunately and a PITA to process. Barely usable even in ideal circumstances.
eh??
Processing was as simple as "click on the thing you want in focus". and 4MP was just fine for casual use it was targetting
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