Lytro Unlock – Making a bad camera slightly better

Ooooh I have an original Lytro and of course it just sits there. I am going to have to try this!<p>By the way don&#x27;t miss this video about the failed 755 megapixel 300fps Lytro Cinema camera, a contraption the size of a car with off the charts data storage requirements.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pfjYecJHMRU">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pfjYecJHMRU</a>

I love this. I collect interesting obsolete hardware; I bought a Light L16 recently for cheap but it can no longer update itself, unfortunately. Lytro is on my list as well.<p>The lytro itself is a lightfield &#x2F; plenoptic camera. It captures the angle of light coming into the camera as well, which lets you calculate focus AFTER the photo has been taken. Focus is, of course, itself just another computation. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;graphics.stanford.edu&#x2F;papers&#x2F;lfcamera&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;graphics.stanford.edu&#x2F;papers&#x2F;lfcamera&#x2F;</a>

&gt; <i>Killer feature of this new technology was the ability to refocus the image after it was taken! (...), the camera was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist</i><p>A related camera technology, but which I&#x27;ve found great to use, is 360 cameras. The ability to re-frame (not focus) the image as I want in post is so great. No longer do I have to spend many attempts positioning a camera perfect, just shoot and later &quot;point&quot; the camera correctly. For instance when filming ski videos, it could take multiple attempts getting the angle correct to get exactly the person+jump in view. Now it just works.

I must admit, I have a really soft spot for well-done reverse engineering write-ups like this. Show me logic board pictures, console commands, code and who-knows-what, and I&#x27;m happy as a squirrel.

Author, if you&#x27;re reading, a really cool thing would be to create a small array of these cameras (4 of them) side by side.<p>The very wide baseline should allow you to enhance&#x2F;deepen the refocusing effect and create a wide format image. I&#x27;ve always wanted to do this.

Shame lytro never made a security video camera variant. Seems like the ideal application, ensuring that anything from vehicle plates in the background to faces in the foreground can be brought into focus.<p>What sort of fps is the API capable of producing jpegs? It sounds like the larger illum can manage 3 fps natively, but couldn&#x27;t find specs on the original lytro.

I&#x27;ve been intrigued by this camera ever since it came out but I had not checked eBay for a long time so I was surprised to see &quot;$20 to $40&quot; mentioned there.<p>Well, the cheapest one is actually $200 as far as I can see, showing results worldwide.

Nice to see old Lytro hardware brought back to life.<p>When they were launching the company, I was so excited about the possibilities. Maybe naively, I was really rooting for being able to take a photo, and then in their software (and later in Lightroom) be able to slide&#x2F;brush-in&#x2F;out points of focus. Alas, all we got were these gimmicky square pictures that you could click to bring various parts to focus.

I was just tweeting the other day about how my Lytro was really fun for a couple days and jogging through focus was neat but after the initial glow it was just an overpriced camera that gave me underwhelming 4 megapixel photos as the final product.<p>I had always hoped for better software to come along. I’ll be curious to see if it can find a second life.

I&#x27;m really surprised that LF cameras haven&#x27;t been added to any phones. I&#x27;d think it would be valuable for &quot;fixing&quot; photos and perhaps allow computation to replace the LIDAR.<p>Though it feels like the cameras are in a &quot;pro&quot; or at least &quot;prosumer&quot; race. Every apple camera announcement seems to tout &quot;advances&quot; that are mostly irrelevant to me (who, like I assume most people, pretty much only uses the camera to take pictures of people and pets).

!! I need to check this out. A friend gave me an old Lytro Illum with a bad test firmware awhile back that I never got around to doing anything with, maybe there&#x27;s some possibility here.

I always wanted to get one and use it for depth mapping. I&#x27;m so glad someone else had the same idea. Kind of a bummer that the company tanked, but I get it.

I was just thinking about Lytro the other day... I was quite young but very excited by the prospect of that technology. I know computational photography and AI have done more for cameras in the past decade, but I&#x27;m still hopeful there&#x27;s a paradigm-shattering advancement in sensor tech.

On a side note, do you think think type of light field photography could be packaged in a phone camera? Right now we have multiple lenses sticking out the back of the phone. Could we replace all that with just a single large light sensor?

Oh sweet. I have an original Lytro. Battery is dead so it would need a repair.

I wonder if a lytro could be attached to a full frame DSLR and take the &#x27;same&#x27; picture as the DSLR, and augment the DSLRs picture with the depth field info captured by the lytro ...

Very cool! Would it be possible to use this for NeRFs? I’m very new to them but it seems like they use light data heavily, at least it seems Luma AI does.

Dang, I literally just sent my Lytro to the recycler during my spring cleaning.

awww, I finally threw mine out during the house cleaning maybe two months ago :(

Could you construct a NeRF from a single Lytro image?