Lytro is the brainchild of Ren Ng, a Stanford Ph.D. whose dissertation on light-field technology five years ago was showered with awards. Now, with the help of $50 million in funding, most of it from Andreessen Horowitz, Ng has built a company that's preparing to launch a focus-free digital camera later this year.
The basic premise of Lytro's technology is pretty simple: The camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels -- and presuming you're using a device with a 3-D ready screen -- even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera's 3-D photos on a laptop and was blown away.)
The best part about the technology is that it doesn't create insanely large files as one would expect. The creator of the tech, Dr. Ren Ng, claims that the files produced are about the size of an average digital photo today, with all the hard work being done by the camera's processor.
It's a technology that has the potential to completely revolutionize photography. Imagine having this sort of camera built into your cellphone? It might not be all that far off. We could see a dedicated Lytro camera by the end of this year, even.
Applications for light fields exist anywhere computational imaging is used. That would include the fields of art, science, engineering and medicine.
Some of the core ideas in light field photography have existed since 1908, Ramamoorthi stated.
However, Lytro CEO Ren Ng developed the original light field camera in his Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford in 2005, UC Berkeley's Ramamoorthi said.
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