Lytro is winding down

https://support.lytro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001773952/

by herodotus • 8 years ago

148 53 8 years ago

support.lytro.com

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-revie...

[2] https://petapixel.com/2017/01/12/look-lytro-illum-camera-fut...

kevingadd• 8 years 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.

danso4• 8 years 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.

dannyw• 8 years 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.

knolan2• 8 years 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.

throwwit• 8 years ago

It’d be interesting to see an implementation with time-of-flight, the precision of surface mapping could only go up. Even combining an SLR improves resolution [ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/192f/708e0470744667f8fc5f41... ]

helb• 8 years ago

Last week on HN: "Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16635676)

tunnuz• 8 years ago

Yeah, is that what happened?

kornish• 8 years ago

Yes.

erric• 8 years ago

So Google didn’t buy them? This always struck me as a tech Apple would want in their phones, at 4MB though, apparently not.

Also for a very large company, $40 million isn’t a lot.

ipsum2• 8 years ago

It was a acquihire. Buy the talent, kill the company.

lttlrck• 8 years ago

Since iOS 11 depth data is exposed in portrait photos allowing the focus point to be altered. It’s very effective. You need an app though because it’s not possible in the Photos app (yet?) e.g. Focos

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/focos/id1274938524?mt=8

danso4• 8 years ago

IIRC, Lytro photos required special software (Flash/JS embed) in order to provide interactive exploration of the light field data. But looks like the specially hosted site, pictures.lytro.com, was shut down back in November 2017 [0], leaving users without a way to demonstrate the "Living Picture" functionality other than using the Lytro Desktop software, then exporting to GIF/MOV [1]. Anyone know if Lytro has mentioned plans to open source the format/software? I see they have a Github org with a bunch of repos, but most of it looks like forked libs and things related to devops: https://github.com/lytro

[0] https://support.lytro.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001259712

[1] https://support.lytro.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002733832

jasonkostempski• 8 years ago

I thought that name sounded familiar. I really wanted one of those cameras when they came out, decided against when I saw all the software required to make it useful was closed. I had hoped they or someone else would release something but it never happened.

ISL• 8 years ago

Same here. It was the lack of an open format that stopped me from pursuing it further.

The Lytro founder's Ph.D thesis is extremely well written and informative on lightfield imaging as a whole.

Thank you, Lytro, for existing and showing us a new way forward. May the patents be licensed easily to keep the ball rolling!

vitovito3• 8 years ago

Lytro had announced at one point plans to open-source their viewer, but that never happened: https://web.archive.org/web/20180327231606/https://www.lytro...

As far as I've been able to tell, their hosting service generated online viewers and embeds server-side, rather than their desktop software generating it and uploading it to pictures.lytro, Facebook, or 500px (the supporting services). It won't even let you do that kind of export without logging into api.lytro.com first. (Their Desktop 5 software is a .NET app if anyone wants to try poking at it.)

After their hosting service shut down last year, I crawled every embed the Internet Archive had, and downloaded the additional JSON and JPEG assets necessary to restore the embeds. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Lytro

Those were eventually added, so now any embeds the Wayback had before the shutdown should work again, e.g. http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/30/5949913/lytro-illum-review v. https://web.archive.org/web/20170317183900/http://www.thever...

It's unclear whether all the Lytro file formats (including their later standard "XRAW") have any sort of documentation. The earlier formats (from their pre-Illum camera) do, e.g. https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools but not the later formats, which include camera calibration data.

The viewers on GitHub, e.g. https://github.com/damienfir/lytrogl and https://github.com/behnam/php-lytro are only for their earlier formats.

swiley• 8 years ago

Oh wow! I had no idea anyone was actually making a digital lightfield camera, I thought sensor resolution was too small currently! It's a real shame they're shutting down but I guess there's no good way to view the images it captures.

Decades from now people will be writing blog posts about how lytro was ahead of it's time.

andybak2• 8 years ago

This is only a few weeks old: https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/experimenting-lig...

danso4• 8 years ago

Anyone know whether this turned out to be an acquihire or not? Previous discussion [0] and articles [1] said Lytro was being acquihired by several of Google teams. But no exact price was mentioned ($25 to $40M).

Don't acquihire-closure announcements usually say something like, "We're proud to be joining the great team at Google, who shares our passion/commitment for this technology and [vague promise that this will somehow, at some point, benefit customers of the now-dead company]". But this announcement simply says:

"We’re excited to see what new opportunities the future brings for the Lytro team as we go our separate ways"

I guess that's the least awkward way to phrase the situation if only some of the team got acquihired by Google?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16705583

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17166038/lytro-light-fiel...

_pmf_• 8 years ago

Anyone know whether this turned out to be an acquihire or not?

I suspect a pure patent acquisition.

andybak2• 8 years ago

So. I'm curious how much this is specifically about light fields. Google released this a couple of weeks ago: https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/experimenting-lig...

But there's been very little information about how the acquisition fits into Google's strategy. I read somewhere that the Lytro staff that are brought across into Google will be dispersed across different departments. (obviously not everyone at Lytro was working directly on Lightfield technology but still...)

pulsarpietro• 8 years ago

I wonder who will be next, we are right in the middle of a tech bubble, too much fluff around.

The company wasn't making a lot of money and wasn't booming, otherwise it would not have been sold out, I reckon.

gregjw• 8 years ago

RIP

reeteshv• 8 years ago

I am not into photography, but the idea of Lytro fascinated me! I distinctly remember that when it was launched, there was a layperson explanation of the concept along the lines of, "take a photo as you would normally do and, later on, decide which area to focus on, which to blur, etc."

As the cliché goes, "don't cry because it ended; smile because it happened."

jessaustin• 8 years ago

If I paid that much money and now couldn't even look at all the photos I took, I might cry a little bit...

Maybe the photos are still viewable? There seems to be a bit of a controversy on that topic, but no one willing to say anything definite.

woodydeck• 8 years ago

I make lenticular artwork and owned a Lytro Illum before. The company was quite hostile after ending support for the camera, and refused to open source the web player, which was the only way you could make use of the living photos features and refocusing.

It is sad, because the Illum was a very well designed product and worked quite well for certain things. Unfortunately, Lytro was better at product design than business, and making the best feature of a $1500+ camera non-functional permanently was definitely a dick move.

PedroBatista• 8 years ago

Gotta love the "winding down" expression.

Did the employees went to "greener pastures"?

eecsninja• 8 years ago

I got an offer from Lytro in 2012 but I turned it down to stay at Google, where I still work.

At the time, I considered Lytro because it had real, substantial technology behind it, and was not just some trivial social networking app. I turned it down because assuming a $1B exit, my shares would still not have been that much more than what I got from Google. Six years later, I am doing much better (more earnings, more vacation, and probably better work/life balance) than if I had joined Lytro.

Although I made the right decision in hindsight, I think about how things might have been different if I had accepted that offer. It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies.

jstandard2• 8 years ago

It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies.

This sounds like a non sequitur. The main reason you joined Google over Lytro was money and quality of life.

There's nothing wrong with that. You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world by building Lytro's new camera technologies. Others who were likely in similar situations balanced that equation differently.

s73v3r_2• 8 years ago

"You didn't have as strong of a desire to change the world"

That's a rather dickish thing to say. Especially because, as we've seen time and time again, very, very few of these startups are actually "changing the world". More and more, being asked to join a startup is just being asked to overwork yourself for peanuts and then be screwed out of equity.

tropo• 8 years ago

"I think about how things might have been different if I had accepted that offer. It really calls into question the dominant Silicon Valley culture and narrative that we should join startups and change the world with new technologies."

You would have made them succeed. Without you, they failed.

transistor-man• 8 years ago

As someone who owned a Lytro Illumn, it was surprisingly a wonderful piece of hardware. Its massive and always gets interesting questions from onlookers. It was clear a lot of effort went into bringing a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor into the hands of a consumer. Sure it felt prototype-y, but it wasn't vaporware. It'd be wonderful if they opened up the development environment for the camera itself.

marssaxman• 8 years ago

I really wanted to like my Lytro camera, and I was willing to put up with its hardware limitations, but I could never really trust it as a means of taking pictures I cared about so long as they were stuck inside Lytro's proprietary ecosystem.

burntrelish1273• 8 years ago

Noooooooo

I want my pics.

Lytro is winding down

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