Lytro’s 755 megapixel Cinema light field camera is going to kill the green screen
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lytro-cinema-is-giving-filmmakers-400-gigabytes-per-second-of-creative-freedom/

Lytro is taking its rich, volumetric 3D camera capture technology into the world of TV and film.

The company’s light field solution is a truly beautiful technology that may eventually be in every camera we snap a shot or video with. The tech essentially uses data on all of the available light in a photo to separate objects by depth and store them in a three-dimensional grid. In the future this technology will allow the simple creation of VR-ready navigable 3D spaces, but right now it’s enabling filmmakers the ability to achieve a level of detail and flexibility in gathering shots and making post-production edits that wasn’t previously possible.

Today, the company introduced Lytro Cinema, which is the company’s effort to woo those in the television and film industries with cool camera technology that makes their jobs easier.

The Lytro Cinema camera gathers a truly staggering amount of information on the world around it. The 755 RAW megapixel 40K resolution, 300 FPS camera takes in as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data.

Lytro Cinema
https://www.lytro.com/cinema

The first professional Light Field solution for cinema, providing unparalleled creative freedom and flexibility on set and in post-production.

Lytro Cinema captures all the rays of light within a scene, providing a rich amount of Light Field data. Every pixel has color properties, directional properties, and its exact placement in space.

Lytro Cinema is defying the traditional physics of on set capture by virtualizing creative camera decisions. Infinite creative choices can be generated in post-production including unprecedented control over focus, perspective, aperture and shutter angle – recreating impossible shots.

POST-CAPTURE REFOCUS
& EXTENDED DEPTH OF FIELD

With Light Field cinematography, creative camera controls transform into flexible post-production processes, liberating shots from restrictive on-set decisions.

Focus the camera near or far, control the size of the aperture, and create a shot as if that exact decision was made on set.

Depth Screen

With depth screen, it’s as if there is a green screen for every object in the scene. But it’s not limited to any one object. It’s anywhere in space.

Composite foregrounds and backgrounds using depth information and reduce the demand for cumbersome and expensive green screens on set.

War Stories: Why I Lit Up Lytro
https://backchannel.com/war-stories-why-i-lit-up-lytro-b46124da32a6#.iz720eixm

Scrapping the strategy may be the hardest choice a CEO ever has to make

A little over a year ago at Lytro, it became clear to me that we needed to drastically change the direction of our company. We’d already built two generations of consumer Light Field cameras and were deep into development on our third and fourth generation models. But I was increasingly filled with doubt about our product strategy and direction. Were consumer cameras really our biggest and best opportunity? If not, what should we be focused on instead? Could we pivot dramatically with so much invested in our current direction?

While traditional photography captures the brightness and color of light, a Light Field in addition captures the angle and direction of every ray of light, essentially creating a 3D model of the entire scene. This additional data unlocks a host of previously impossible capabilities ranging from the ability to create photo realistic immersive 3D worlds, to new ways of integrating computer graphics with live action, to ultimately software eating cameras as we know them. Lytro was founded by the incredible Dr. Ren Ng, now our Chairman and a professor at UC Berkeley, and was based on the pioneering work he did at Stanford for his PhD.

The incredibly hard part, as it turned out, was figuring out which application and market to apply our technology to first.

If you believe what you read in the tech press, the streets are going to be stained with Unicorn blood; but from my perspective we’ve seen this all before. For anyone who chooses to spend their career building technology startups, we will see it all again. In my experience, building a technology startup has always been hard.

We began to hear regularly from prospective customers that they weren’t interested in our cloud services. In their minds we were on a certain path to bankruptcy. But it wasn’t all bad news: they were very interested in buying the software we had developed to automate the operations of our own data centers, called Opsware.

Many of these learnings and experiences resonated as I thought about the right next step at Lytro in late January 2015. I realized that we simply were not on a path to build a winning product.

While consumer Light Field cameras offered a number of true technological breakthroughs such as interactive 3D pictures, radical lens specs, and the ability to focus a picture after the fact we had a number of disadvantages as well including 4X larger file sizes and lower resolution in comparison to other similarly priced cameras. The cold hard fact was that we were competing in an established industry where the product requirements had been firmly cemented in the minds of consumers by much larger more established companies. This issue was compounded by the fact that the consumer camera market was declining by almost 35% per year driven by the surge in smartphone photography and changing consumer tastes.

The bulk of the team began experimenting with different approaches to real world Virtual Reality which culminated with our announcement of Lytro Immerge in November. We’re still in the early days with Lytro Immerge but the product-market-fit of Light Field technology and VR has exceeded even our highest expectations.

Unlock Immersive Storytelling with Complete Creative Control
https://www.lytro.com/immerge

Break away from the creative limitations of existing tools designed for flat video frames. Lytro Immerge is built from the ground up to seamlessly blend live action and computer graphics (CG) using Light Field data. With configurable capture and playback solutions, it supports a range of new immersive storytelling needs.

This UFO-Shaped Mega-Camera Might Be the Future of Virtual Reality
The Lytro Immerge is a next-generation VR camera rig for professionals that will start at $250,000.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-05/this-ufo-shaped-mega-camera-might-be-the-future-of-virtual-reality

Virtual reality entertainment is slowly approaching the mainstream. And it’s doing so in what looks like a UFO.

Lytro first burst on the scene in 2012 pushing a small $150 camera that let you refocus pictures after you took them. Advancing that idea a step, Lytro then released the Illum in 2014, a more robust take on the original Lytro with a zoom lens, bigger sensor, and more advanced features. The core of these cameras is something called light field image sensing. To risk oversimplifying a bit, this basically means the image sensor is capturing the color, intensity, and direction of light beams (most camera sensors omit direction), letting it create 3D representations of whatever it’s receiving.

The new Immerge rig is built on the same idea but is a far cry from the original consumer Lytro cameras.

The body is made of a spherical array of high-definition video cameras fitted into rings, then mounted on a three-legged base. It’s meant to simulate a human head, but one that’s looking in all possible directions at once. This means it sees 360 degrees around the center, as well as above and below the unit, still capturing color, intensity, and depth. Lytro calls the new capture method a “light field volume.”

I haven’t seen any footage taken with the Immerge, but Lytro suggests that the difference between this experience and what’s currently being shot with other 3D VR rigs is dramatic.

There are some major caveats with the Immerge. The tripod you see here is only part of the actual camera rig. Coming out from between the legs will be a bundle of cables not seen in these renderings. That will have to be plugged into a proprietary server unit that can store an hour of footage before it needs to offload the data to a more permanent storage solution. From there, editors can work with the footage in whatever application they’re accustomed to using (Lytro opted for plug-ins instead of creating its own proprietary editor) and publish in formats that will work with any commercially VR headset, including Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR.

All this means the Immerge is much better suited to shooting in studio or urban settings, since power sources aren’t readily available for a setup like this in the middle of the desert (or anywhere to hide the server from the camera, for that matter).

Lytro says they should have working prototypes ready for user testing in early 2016, with final units ready soon after that.

The folks at Lytro have always believed that light field technology is the future, and not just for photography and storytelling. They believe that anything with a lens and a sensor can benefit from the technology, and with today’s announcement of the Lytro Platform, they’re opening up their proprietary tech to anybody who wants to partner up with them and expand light field into new markets.

The goal of the Lytro Platform is to “bring the transformational power of the light field to an entirely new set of imaging applications for the first time,” and the first step is the release of the Lytro Development Kit (LDK).

The LDK, hardware illustrated above, costs $20K and “provides imaging researchers with the highest degree of control of Lytro’s advanced light field capture devices and processing engine.” In English, that means unprecedented access to Lytro’s hardware and software so that researchers in all fields can begin experimenting with the light field.

But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so
people could connect with it better. Youve got
an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two pictures.

Maybe you could space it out better?