What do you get when you combine two recent gadget-newcomers on the upswing?
Eric Cheng, Lytro’s Director of Photography, has recently taken his first LightField pictures from a Lytro camera that was mounted on a ADS 400Q quadcopter – one of the multi-rotor helicopter drones that have been conquering the mainstream in recent years.
Following their recent announcement, Lytro just has started the first ever International LightField Photo Contest.
For the next two months, you’ll have the chance to enter one Living Picture per day, per username. More precisely, submissions are accepted from May 1 to 21, and from June 1 to 21, 2013.
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Processing Lytro LightField Pictures is generally done within the free, official Lytro Desktop Software. If you want more control over your LightField results, though, there are a few tools available to do just that. (Note that the Desktop Software is still needed to transfer the pictures from the camera.)
The newest addition to the list of openly available LightField tools is LightField Toolbox v0.1 for Matlab, by Donald G. Dansereau.
It its initial release, it is limited to basic features such as loading, decoding, colour correction and visualization (including a basic perspective shift effect) of Lytro light field images. But there’s more to come!
This version of the toolbox and documentation are focused on Lytro imagery. Adapting this to other cameras should be straightforward. Future releases will support additional input formats, camera calibration, image rectification, and depth and volumetric filtering for improved rendering quality.
How do you turn a scientific concept into a product that the average person talks about?
At South by Southwest (SXSW) 2013, Lytro’s VP of Marketing Kira Wampler talked about this question, about building a brand, and disrupting photography itself.
You’ve created a disruptive new technology that’s going to revolutionize an industry – at least until you can figure out how to explain it to someone. Kira Wampler, VP of Marketing for Lytro, discuss how to craft a compelling story about your product or technology and how to educate the average consumer about your breakthrough technology, and turn PhD concepts into cocktail conversations. Continue reading
Back in July of last year, Lytro founder Ren Ng announced he would step down as CEO of the company, and get back to innovation, technology and strategic direction in the position of Executive Chairman. Until Lytro could find a new Chief Executive Officer, former EC Charles Chi kept the spot warm as an interim CEO.
In an interview, Chi said that Lytro wasn’t looking for a lead engineer or a head marketer, as it feels it is well-stocked in both regards.
“What we are looking for is somebody who has some experience in developing transformational businesses,” he told AllThingsD. “That’s what Lytro is in the midst of — getting a new idea adopted across a mature marketplace.”
Now, the company has a “new fearless leader”: Continue reading