The Lytro Light Field Camera lets you focus a photo after you shoot it. Sounds neat! So what went wrong at this $360 million dollar company?

TV-sarjan ja leffan voi kuvata älypuhelimella helpommin kuin järkkärillä ja jälkikäsittelymahdollisuudet vain paranevat. Missähän vaiheessa älypuhelimilla voisi kuvata RAW-videota? 8k onnistuu jo ja jopa minun monta vuotta vanhaa tekniikkaa edustava Samsung S10+ kuvaa varsin pätevää 4k HDR-videota.

Did Apple’s iPhone 13 ‘Cinematic Mode’ just revolutionize mobile cinematography?
https://m.dpreview.com/articles/5269208817/did-apple-iphone-13-cinematic-mode-just-revolutionize-mobile-cinematography?utm_source=Facebook-share&utm_medium=desktop-article-header&utm_campaign=social-sharing

Apple has just announced its iPhone 13 lineup, and one of the stand out features is the new ‘Cinematic Mode’. On the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max models, Cinematic Mode allows you to adjust the aperture, or f-stop, to change the depth-of-field effect after you’ve shot your video. It also allows you change what’s in focus, or rack focus from one subject to another, after-the-fact.

Remember the Lytro Cinema camera the size of a small car that promised the same thing? Think that… but in your pocket.

When Cinematic Mode is enabled, the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro models generate a depth map in video, which software can later use to selectively blur the foreground and background and simulate any chosen f-stop. Presumably, it can do so either by simple learning-based segmentation (identification of human or primary subjects) or by using the stereo disparity between the wide and ultra-wide cameras.* While the larger sensors in these phones will lend the footage shallower native depth-of-field than previous phones, the depth map allows for additional computational blur much like the Portrait Mode that is so popular on smartphone devices these days.

Futuristic “light field” camera maker Lytro is shutting down, according to a statement posted online. The company says that starting today, it will stop “taking on new productions and providing professional services,” as it prepares to “wind down” the company over an unspecified period of time. “We’re excited to see what new opportunities the future brings for the Lytro team as we go our separate ways,” says the statement. “We would like to thank the various communities that have supported us and hope that our paths will cross in the future.”

Lytro doesn’t say what will happen to the company’s patents or its employees. TechCrunch reported last week that Google was acquiring Lytro, and a person familiar with the matter confirmed to The Verge that a large fraction of former Lytro employees will be joining Google. But contrary to last week’s rumors, the person says Google isn’t trying to supplement its own light-field photography experiments with Lytro tech.

TechCrunch reported that Lytro was being sold for between $25 and $40 million, but this person characterized Google’s move as more of a hiring deal than a company acquisition and did not confirm any price. Google declined a request for comment.

Lytro has struggled for years to build a viable business with its novel camera technology, which captures an image at multiple depths.

To the Cinematic and VR Community, Live Long and Prosper
http://blog.lytro.com/to-the-cinematic-and-vr-community-live-long-and-prosper/

Last week, Google showed off a new app to display immersive photography in virtual reality, and a multi-camera technique for capturing it, and now it looks like there may be plans to enhance that with some bolted-on technology created by a third party.

Multiple sources tell us that Google is acquiring Lytro, the imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR.

Light Field technology is a fascinating area of Virtual Reality research that emulates the way that light behaves to make a virtual scene look more realistic. By emulating light coming from multiple angles entering the eye, the scenes look more realistic because they look closer to reality. It is rumored to be part of the technology included in the forthcoming Magic Leap headset, but it looks like Google is trying to steal some of their thunder.

The magic sauce is in the way the image is captured, as Google uses a semicircular arrangement of 13 GoPro cameras that are rotated to capture about a thousand images. The captured images are then stitched together by Google’s software to create the final image, which has a light field effect. It is thought that the forthcoming Magic Leap headset needs special optics to create this effect but the Google version works on standard VR headsets.

Experimenting with Light Fields
https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/experimenting-light-fields/

With light fields, nearby objects seem near to you—as you move your head, they appear to shift a lot. Far-away objects shift less and light reflects off objects differently, so you get a strong cue that you’re in a 3D space. And when viewed through a VR headset that supports positional tracking, light fields can enable some truly amazing VR experiences based on footage captured in the real world.

This is possible because a light field records all the different rays of light coming into a volume of space. To record them, we modified a GoPro Odyssey Jump camera, bending it into a vertical arc of 16 cameras mounted on a rotating platform.

While many of the virtual reality experiences being shown off at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival are pushing boundaries in VR story-telling techniques, “Hallelujah” is perhaps most noteworthy because of the cutting edge tech used to shoot the experience and the story behind it.

A few months after announcing development on its VR-centric camera, the company announced Lytro Cinema, an almost comically large filmmaking camera that sports the highest resolution video sensor ever made capturing as much as 400 gigabytes per second.

The virtual reality rig used to shoot “Hallelujah” also comes with a massive form factor; Lytro’s VR Immerge camera is a hulking, data-hungry, hexagonal device made up of an array of 95 individual cameras.