When I look lately at the new things that have been “innovated” I’m hard pressed to find anything that is extremely original, back-to-basics and is a complete reinvention of a common item. That was until I discovered the new camera designed by a new Silicon Valley start-up called Lytro which has revolutionised photography.
The camera takes “living pictures”. That is to say that after images are taken you can focus or refocus your pictures on a computer. Further you can change the perspective from which the picture is seen and switch a photo back and forth between 2-D and 3-D. That’s why it calls the images “living pictures.”. The Lytro camera is called a light-field camera, which is based on a very different technology from traditional digital cameras. In simple terms, it uses a modified sensor, plus proprietary software, to capture and process more, and different, information about the light hitting its lens than other cameras do. This includes the direction of light rays. The result is a richer picture file that software, on the camera and on a computer, can use to manipulate images in new ways. Lytro doesn’t even classify its camera by the familiar megapixel measure. Instead, the company says it has a resolution of 11 megarays — in other words, it can capture 11 million light rays. I see this as a great companion to a DSLR.
Ren Ng, the Malaysian-born inventor of Lytro living and studying in Silicon Valley, transformed Lytro from a Stanford University PhD project into a potentially lucrative commercial reality. The technology caught the eye of the late Steve Jobs, who invited Ng to his Palo Alto home to demo the device. Subsequently Lytro attracted $50 million start-up cash from venture capitalists.
Check it out at https://www.lytro.com