The Lytro camera, which launched this past Wednesday, takes photos that the user can refocus after the fact. It's a cool trick — and you can experience it via the photo below — but it's really just scratching the surface of what the technology behind the camera can do. Soon users will be able to create 3D effects and even, with upgraded equipment, shoot slow-motion wraparound video like the kind seen in the Matrix movies.
The Lytro creates its "living pictures" by capturing the entire light field, not just the color and intensity of light but also the direction of individual rays. The technology behind putting light-field capture into a small camera was about a decade in the making, based on research done by the company's CEO, Ren Ng, as a graduate student at Stanford.
"Through a series of serendipitous moments," Lytro vice president of marketing Kira Wampler explains, "Ren taught himself how to build the camera because he was so driven by this desire to take this room full of cameras and miniaturize it in such a way that real people could take advantage of taking pictures with the light field."
Now that it's released its first camera, Lytro has a long list of features and enhancements that it intends to pursue. Early adopters of the Lytro camera needn't worry too much either — since the files the camera produces store all the light-field information of a scene, anything Lytro releases to take advantage of that data can be used on old pics.
First on the agenda: 3D. Lytro has already demonstrated how it's relatively easy to use the light field to create a 3D effect on a photo. Moreover, you'll be able to click and drag the photo to change the angle of the 3D perspective. The effect will be limited to what the camera can see, however, equivalent to moving your head an few inches in each direction.
A Lytro video camera is farther out, but it has the potential for an even more impressive effect. The light field, after all, is fundamentally the same idea used in the Matrix films to create the wraparound slow-motion effects often referred to as "bullet time." By using more than one camera, possibly linked via wireless, Lytro users could recreate those effects on their own.
"It's not that far away," says Wampler. "If you had a camera over here and a camera over there — that know each other — then you can do bullet time."
Besides different ways of using the light field, Lytro also says it's going to add editing features in its desktop software, letting you do things like touch up exposure or crop photos. Pro-level features are also in the works, like being able to focus at a point in space even if there's no object there in the photo.
"Editing will be very cool," says Wampler. "One of the reasons we haven't unleashed it yet is that we want it to be functionality that really takes advantage of the multidimensionality of the picture. For us, we have multiple layers. For example we could make the foreground black and white and the background sepia."
Perhaps most importantly, the company says it will eventually make its proprietary file format — the .lfp format — available to any photo service that wants to adopt it. For example, Facebook could integrate it so instead of just sharing the photo, you could use it as your profile pic.
"It is a matter of when not if," says Wampler. "Native adoption of the light field file format with other editing, sharing and organizing tools is a priority for us."
What would you like to see Lytro work on next? Have your say in the comments.
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