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Post by Perry Mike Ulas with Chicago IT Pros and Coders
Stealthy start-up Lytro is unveiling
some fascinating new camera technology that could be a major leap in photography–maybe the biggest since the shift from
film to digital.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is developing a new kind of camera to be released later this year based on
“light field” technology. Light field images are based on research from Stanford University that captures all
of the light ways streaming into a camera from a scene–from every visible point in the foreground to every point in
the background.
This means that someone can take a picture without focusing, and later on, after loading the photo onto a computer,
then focus it to any point in the picture. The viewer of the image can then click anywhere in the photo to focus on a particular
point in the photo.
Lytro CEO Ren Ng founded the company in 2006 after completing a dissertation on light field photography at Stanford in 2006 in computer science and winning the best
dissertation award. Previously light field images had to be taken with hundreds of cameras attached to high powered computers.
But Lytro has built a new kind of camera sensor, replacing the traditional digital camera sensor, which captures every ray
of light hitting it. Lytro also has software to turn that data into the shifting-focus images.
In my admittedly Luddite analog camera
mind–I actually like to shoot film with my Rolleiflex–Lytro
could make shooting photos so easy it could almost be too easy. But Ng makes a good case that the new technology will open
up new types of photography and new uses of photography.
“What digital photography did was make it easier and more accessible
and more egalitarian,” Ng says. “With technology like light fields, Lytro opens up new creative avenues for photography.”
People can take
photos much faster than before, because they won’t have to focus or press the button down half way as they do now. Also
there is a new element of mystery, Ng says, for photographers who want to make certain areas of photos (or the whole photo)
out of focus, enabling viewers to explore the photo and find surprising things.
Lytro also enables very low light
photos because it captures so much light on its sensor. Finally, because Lytro is capturing so much of the visible light streaming
into the camera, its images can also be 3D images–particularly if you have 3D glasses.
Commercializing
this technology is a challenge the company faces. While Lytro intends to license the technology, Ng wanted Lytro to develop
its own camera. The new camera will be built with Lytro’s technology as the core of the camera, and not just be a “feature”
to add on to other cameras, he says.
Besides bringing venture capitalists such as Ben Horowitz, Patrick Chung
and Charles Chi and Tivo cofounder Mike Ramsay on as board members, the company has brought on a number of employees and advisors
to built out the consumer electronics part of the company including advisors: Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, VMware cofounder Diane Greene, Dolby Labs chairman Peter Gotcher and Sling
Media cofounder Blake Krikorian.
Lytro also is announcing that it just raised Series C financing led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding
to $50 million. Other investors include New Enterprise Associates, K9 Ventures, and Greylock Partners.
I’m not able to embed the Lytro
images into this post, but I have posted separate images from the same Lytro photo to give a sense of it.
