Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/sources-google-is-buying-lytro-for-about-40m/

by lxm • 8 years ago

289 103 8 years ago

nradov• 8 years ago

Well that was the logical outcome. Their technology was interesting but it clearly wasn't viable as a stand-alone compact camera. Everyone expected it would eventually be integrated into smartphones.

greglindahl• 8 years ago

Or, as is often said in the Valley: "Is it a product, or a feature?"

guardian5x• 8 years ago

It could be smartphones, i also think the technology would be interesting for streetview.

Gibbon1• 8 years ago

I thought they had switched from consumer camera's to large 3D light field camera's for shooting movies.

lern_too_spel• 8 years ago

They tried to build the whole ecosystem around light field photography themselves. To do that, they would need to raise Magic Leap levels of capital, which they decided not to do.

cmac29922• 8 years ago

Awesome. After playing with Google's go pro light field images, it's really hard to go back and enjoy regular 360 photos. The quality and 6dof sense of presence. was amazing. Hopefully the addition of lytros tech makes it even better.

modeless• 8 years ago

These are the mentioned light field images: https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/experimenting-lig...

They can only be experienced properly with a positionally tracked VR headset, but they are extremely cool if you have one.

owenversteeg3• 8 years ago

HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets... and it seems like Windows Mixed Reality headsets are available for around $200 on Amazon. Wow, we live in the future. I guess the main cost here is the PC attached to them... probably costs about $500 minimum if I'd have to guess for something with the specs required.

[edit] wow, you can get an Asus pre-built desktop for $440, damn! i5-7400, 12gb DDR4, 2TB HDD, graphics good enough for VR... wow. Anyone know if it's possible to build your own for a competitive price, or if that'd drive up the cost? I remember the days when it was cheaper to build your own...

watersb• 8 years ago

When I saw Google's spherical-photo capture bot -- basically an array of Lytro cameras -- I figured this would happen soon.

ipsum24• 8 years ago

Can you link me to this? I only know that Google is using GoPros to do light field capture: https://petapixel.com/2018/03/15/google-built-arc-16-gopros-...

Robotbeat• 8 years ago

No, they were regular GoPros frame-synced and spun around to act as even more cameras.

You can, in fact, do this with a single regular camera (with a wide-field lense) if you're patient enough and have a multi-axis motorized (and encodered) mount.

chirau• 8 years ago

I remember Ben Horowitz singing praises for this company. Must be a good pay day for A16Z.

nigelcleland2• 8 years ago

From the article, the sale price is estimated at $40 million, whilst the company had raised $200 million, most recently at a $360 million valuation.

Most likely not a good pay day, definitely a significant haircut for some of the investors to say the least.

vadimberman2• 8 years ago

Agree, and given the standard "liquidity preference", the founders are likely to net $0, except for the Google bonuses for the engineering (Jack Barker-like Rosenthal is not likely to stick there).

It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time. Yet another incident that will encourage to pick copycats over real innovation.

I guess Google is no longer as generous with the acquisitions.

bwang29• 8 years ago

Lytro has really cool technology but never really found a good use case for consumers. I owned both the 1st generation and 2nd generation camera, as much as I hated the UI of the software and usability of the hardware, I can clearly see the team has tried really hard to make it usable. They tried building an editing app, a community, a community 2.0, multiple hardware batch revisions. I wonder why they didn’t stop sooner or up to which point they feel like this direction is done. I felt they never really listened to the photographer community during the process, or answer support sufficiently, they have done pretty much the exact opposite of user first or user driven product development in my opinion, and this still left me confused today. Burning a few million dollars a month, I feel it really took a series of very bad decisions to lead to this financial outcome.

samstave2• 8 years ago

They are buying them to make dash cams for self driving cars is my guess...

That tech in dash-cam video is priceless

akhatri_aus• 8 years ago

It's likely for VR, the 'reverse' of the Lytro allows projection to the eye at multiple focal points.

coldtea2• 8 years ago

Why would it be priceless?

With dash-cam video you can just chose a fixed hyperfocal distance and have everything in good focus.

You certainly don't need creative DoP and bokeh...

randomerr• 8 years ago

I think its more that what the tech is for the Pixel 2 Super XL edition or Pixel 3. That would let you build a 3d photo and post it to Google Photos. Or maybe they could partner up with a 3D printing company the way you can print photo albums.

Stratoscope4• 8 years ago

I discovered Lytro at the Maker Faire when they had their "borrow a Lytro" demo. It was a great bit of marketing: take a Lytro around the Faire for an hour (where are there are always plenty of interesting subjects) and afterward they put all your shots in an online gallery for you. I got a fun shot or two that day and promptly bought one of their first cameras.

But it wasn't a very good camera, and they completely missed the boat on making it a storytelling tool.

I took my Lytro with me when I walked with Team Torani (the Italian syrup people) in the Columbus Day parade that year, and did not get even one good shot. I wished I'd brought my little point-and-shoot instead, or just about any other camera, because I would have gotten dozens of good shots.

The pitch at the time was "you can put your photos on lytro.com, and people who view your gallery can click anywhere to refocus!" But who wants to do that? If you're looking at a gallery of photos, do you want to go clicking around to bring different things in and out of focus? I don't.

But for a photographer, this had some potential as a storytelling tool. Imagine having a photo that would do its own "pull focus" [1] when you view it, like in the movies. The photographer could first focus on one subject and then have it slowly change focus to something else to reveal something new to the person viewing the photo. Kind of a Ken Burns effect [2] but in the focus plane instead of - or perhaps in addition to - panning and zooming.

I remember one photo I got at the Menlo Park street fair that would have lent itself to this. I had the camera down around knee height, and a dog came up with his nose inches from the lens. In the background was his owner, an attractive young lady. It was a nice shot, and I imagined having it start with the dog's nose in focus and then gradually pulling the focus back to the owner.

Granted, this wasn't much of a story, but it was something. I couldn't even do that. All I could do on lytro.com was set the initial focus, and then leave it to any viewers to go clicking around to fiddle with the focus themselves. But nobody wants to do that.

It seemed like an opportunity lost, because they were so focused (pun intended) on the amazing technology and not on how to use it to tell stories.

[1] https://vimeo.com/233143268

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect

ipsum24• 8 years ago

I was of the opinion that Lytro was just a gimmick (we have light fields, what can we do with them?), but your post is really insightful. What you describe sounds like a useful product.

gt_• 8 years ago

There is a lot of interesting stuff in your review. As a more classic photographer myself, I had some different criticisms but also found the thing about letting others click interact with the focus offputting.

The tech was really interesting to photographers and I absolutely think it could be adopted if built into a reasonable camera design. It’s very normal for photographers to carry many cameras and I knew people to carry Lyros some but I think some of it was that the company had two different users if was designing for, which isn’t usually a problem with cameras but this was so different and novelty that it mattered. I really think if they just made super nerdy products without trying to satisfy the cell phone crowd, they could have built a niche following in photographers.

jacobolus• 8 years ago

I think there’s a different (and to me more interesting) potential, which is to expose the layering to allow creative effects in post. For example you could realistically stick fog into any picture (or remove some amount of fog/haze from pictures that had it to begin with), turn the background monochromatic, add motion blur selectively at particular depths, create focus blur with any bokeh you want, take multiple pictures with the same person in different places and composite them together, etc. etc.

With careful and laborious use of Photoshop it’s possible to do most anything today, but with a light-field image there are a lot of creative controls that could be made easier, faster, and more reliable. (Of course, doing this properly would take hiring some signal processing gurus, color scientists, professional photo retouchers, and interface designers, and spending years on semi-open-ended research.)

angrygoat• 8 years ago

I've got a Lytro, and haven't used it for years, for many of the reasons you articulate.

To my mind their mistake was not having an open source library that could work with their capture format, including basic support for focusing and producing an output image for display.

Pretty much every new photography tech has had a community of amateurs and professionals spring up around it and (hopefully) innovate.

They missed out on that; all we got was the fun-for-a-few-minutes clicking around thing, which gets old pretty fast.

owenversteeg3• 8 years ago

Do you still have the photo? I'd be curious to see it!

acct1771• 8 years ago

The pitch at the time was "you can put your photos on lytro.com, and people who view your gallery can click anywhere to refocus!" But who wants to do that?

JFK assassination researchers.

michaelbuckbee• 8 years ago

The Vimeo link above goes to an astoundingly effective video essay on focus pulling, focus racks, etc. I'm not in any way doing video related work, but it was fascinating and I just wanted to recommend it.

sp332• 8 years ago

But they did stop. They wound down the consumer products years ago and moved into enterprise consulting and selling huge cameras to move sets.

bunderbunder2• 8 years ago

1st gen owner here.

They absolutely tried hard, but I feel like they missed out on doing the one thing that might have really let the product take off: Releasing APIs (or at least protocol specs) for interacting with the camera over USB and wifi, and releasing a spec for their file format.

That might have given them a chance to really take off in the DIY and hobbyist market. After unboxing mine, I pretty much immediately wanted to use it to do the sorts of things that Google seems to want to do it. But without an easy way to dig into it, I lost interest pretty quickly.

Taking off my hacker hat and putting on my consumer hat, it just wasn't going to take off. My cell phone is even more portable, takes higher resolution images, and makes sharing them much easier. Getting to refocus after the fact wasn't that great a trick, because my cell phone camera already does such a good job at autofocusing.

Taking that one off and putting on my hobby photographer hat, same thing. Decades of taking pictures has left me with enough of a sense for where I want to put the focal point and what I want to do with the bokeh that I'd just as soon do it when I'm taking the picture. There was some initial fun of playing with a new toy, but ultimately I realized that doing it after the fact took what has historically been one of my favorite parts of photography and turned it into just another editing chore. That, and, even when I'm not 100% sure what I want to do with the focus at the time I'm taking the photo, my mirrorless's burst mode can accomplish essentially the same thing.

But if I could have strapped that sucker onto a robot and played with using it for 3D scene reconstruction or something. . . that would have been fun.

majormajor2• 8 years ago

How well did it work for action?

That's where I find myself always hating autofocus (even on a fancy camera with focus tracking and motion detection and such).

PaulHoule3• 8 years ago

How about the potential as a robotics camera, say to compete with the Kinect or with laser scanners for self-driving cars, etc..?

Deimorz• 8 years ago

If you have a VR headset, I highly suggest trying out the "Welcome to Light Fields" demo that Google released on Steam last week (it's free): http://store.steampowered.com/app/771310/Welcome_to_Light_Fi...

It's absolutely incredible and seems like really promising technology. Even with the relatively low resolution of current headsets, the image quality is amazing and you can see some slight lighting changes as you move your head, which makes it feel far more immersive than a static photo. There should be a lot of potential to use this for extremely realistic virtual tours.

Note: I had some slight issues with it "hitching" at the start of each scene in the guided tour (which made me feel a bit of motion-sickness), but that was probably because I didn't install it on an SSD (or my PC is just not quite fast enough overall). There weren't any issues when viewing the scenes individually afterwards.

rjth• 8 years ago

As someone who has been working with stereo 180 videos in VR for the past few months, this technology makes such a huge difference. While stereo photography looks broken from most angles, Google's lightfields demo just felt natural. Honestly, one of the best VR experiences I've tried in a while.

owenversteeg3• 8 years ago

Huh, that'd certainly explain why Google wanted to pay $40MM for it. Thanks!

bb882• 8 years ago

I thought the future of light field cameras would be to replace the bulky DSLR's and their lenses.

If you can do that, then autofocus systems go away completely. What you're left with is the shutter and zoom, and the computer's ability to make beautiful bokeh from any image.

fudged71• 8 years ago

The problem is the sensor cost. You are sacrificing pixels for information/depth, meaning you need more pixels for the same result. Most people aren't willing to go back to a 2MP camera when much better image quality cameras are on the market.

bb882• 8 years ago

Maybe not the home user, but people are willing to pay lots of money for photography gear if it gets the results they want.

Broncolor, Hasselblad, Leica and Zeiss, all come to mind as specialty companies that make money from selling expensive gear.

micheljansen• 8 years ago

For AR & VR this makes perfect sense. In VR space you do not want to be stuck with a single predetermined focus point, but have the freedom to move around the light field. Lytro's patents alone are probably a steal at $40M.

evilset• 8 years ago

I'll be waiting for you OASIS, but not so soon.

neves2• 8 years ago

Can someone explain to me reasoning of the deal? It looks to me more some kind of Silicon Valley brotherhood deal. Sure 40m to Google is change money, but it is a failed company and they could duplicate the tech with far less.

neves2• 8 years ago

Maybe it is the 59 patents...

kypro• 8 years ago

The fact many of the employees seem to have been given severance would imply that to me.

m3kw9• 8 years ago

This tells me the tech isn’t too useful from the price and from the buyer and the amount of time it took to get a sale on that price.

That’s beside the fact that it does this selective focus thing which should be automatic anyways or selected during the shot.

Jtsummers5• 8 years ago

Along with selective focus (which struck me as gimmicky) you do get 3d images from a single sensor with better detail than a stereoscopic setup (2x standard cameras). This is useful for computational work as you can get better spatial data from one source or if you add multiple sensors you can get even more improvement.

I always figured this would be used in a fashion similar to synthetic aperture radar, but using image data, and applied to autonomous vehicles and similar applications. It's better than edge detection from a standard single sensor. And you have more to train your algorithms on since they can recognize what is an actual object more easily versus what is an image of an object.

mseebach2• 8 years ago

I tried to click around on Lytro's website, but it left me pretty baffled. What the f... is it?

w0m• 8 years ago

A camera that allows you to 'focus after the fact'. Actually pretty sweet tech; though it never really caught on.

Jtsummers5• 8 years ago

Lytro makes light field cameras. A single sensor can be used to capture enough information to do a lot of computational imagery work like the somewhat gimmicky example of changing focus. But you also have enough data to do things like accurately apply filters to parts of an image based on depth information. A good simulation of viewing the image through caustics or other distortion effects. And, to me the most interesting, reconstruct 3d information from a single sensor.

Downsides, a 16 megapixel sensor only got something like 4 megapixel of image resolution because of how much data has to be captured for the light field. So consumer grade sensors resulted in (by contemporary standards) very low resolution images. And all those neat effects weren't really available, except maybe to their commercial partners (later products and services).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera

mseebach2• 8 years ago

Thanks!

jonbarker• 8 years ago

Light field cameras always fascinated me because they are the example of the literal opposite of evolutionary biological inspiration (this is not an insult by the way). The first biological 'eyes' were probably light sensitive spots on skin with no lenses or shape, which then became cavities for directional sensing and then lenses and retinas developed to enable image recognition.

electrograv• 8 years ago

The compound eyes of some insects are very similar to how a lightfield camera is optically structured.

Dirlewanger• 8 years ago

Hasn't Photoshop had this tech for a couple years now? I remember seeing on HN a video of Adobe demonstrating it at a conference.

vernie• 8 years ago

Which tech are you referring to?

John_KZ• 8 years ago

Lytro captures true depth information. Sure, you can blur things in Photoshop, but it simply doesn't look like the real, depth-of-field based blur on real lenses, or the calculated one of light-field cameras. Re-focusing on photoshop is just a gimmic to fake the real thing (and if you're experienced in photography you can always tell)

rweba• 8 years ago

This should not be viewed as a failure.

This is the nature of startups, even if you do every single thing right, work hard, manage the cash flow, innovate, etc., there is a more than 90% chance you won't get that billion dollar plus exit.

The only unique thing here is that Lytro got a lot of hype and raised a lot of money, so people naturally expected a unicorn.

What I am saying is these guys don't necessarily have anything to be ashamed of. In the worst case they gained a lot of experience that they can apply to their next idea.

That said, I am curious: Will the founders get ANY money out of it? A comment claimed that they raised $200 million at $360 million valuation, so theoretically they may end up with nothing.

inuhj• 8 years ago

My estimate is that the founders took money off the table during those rounds. It's doubtful they'll see anything from the sale. I wouldn't worry too much about them I'm sure they're sitting fine.

Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

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