By the way don'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.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
In short: pay attention or get left behind.
The lytro itself is a lightfield / 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. http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
Thank you, that was something of a revelation in understanding how these cameras actually work.
Just linear algebra, to be precise. A lens is just a matrix and rays are simply vectors. Combining lenses is merely matrix multiplication and complex optical systems can be represented by the result, which is a plain simple matrix again. The Eigenvalues tell you interesting properties of your optical system.
I've always enjoyed this part of physics because it is so simple and elegant, yet so powerful.
If you look closely linear algebra pops up in many places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_optics#Fourier_transfo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
Toshiba Twin S-VHS changer https://youtu.be/aEEYuJw7vFk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Rockers
0.85" / 22 mm HDD used in MP3 players
https://web.archive.org/web/20120718025547/http://www.toshib...
-- Computing peripherals --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/12416/Logitech-Cyber...
-- Alternative computers --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr
-- Electronics --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
Grandparents had a Heathkit TV like this with an ultrasonic remote that could also be controlled by jingling keys:
https://www.nostalgickitscentral.com/heath/products/tv/gr250...
== Of course ==
Grandpa's Polaroid 350
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation#/media/Fi...
I should probably make a list of my collection. A working juicero. A rolleron. An itanium cpu. A working General Magic device. The iBook I wrote del.icio.us on…
I had capsela as a kid. Hadn’t thought about it in decades. Thank you.
I wished my Sony A7 had such a nice and elegant shortcut for remote video recording. Instead it has a crappy little remote control that eats batteries like candy and that seems to un-pair spontaneously in mid recording session and other such niceties.
A related camera technology, but which I'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 "point" 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.
When you’re in the heart of it it’s so easy to take pride in the technical challenges you’ve overcome, but completely miss the realities of the marketplace.
But yeah, they haven't taken that much off compared to traditional action cams. The frame rate and resolution after reframing is the blocker for many. And hard to do that with the current available sensors it seems like, and no one right now wants to gamble on spending much on R&D for launching the next gen.
The very wide baseline should allow you to enhance/deepen the refocusing effect and create a wide format image. I've always wanted to do this.
At the time, I always considered passive ranging to be a potentially more valuable feature of lightfield cameras more so than refocusing images.
Depth maps from light fields were a topic Disney Research was publishing on while I was there. Great stuff, highly recommend checking out their siggraph paper.
http://www.plenoptic.info/pages/software.html
I take stereograms with a Qoocam Ego, I have thought about getting a medium size Lytro, (the one that looks like a DSLR.)
What sort of fps is the API capable of producing jpegs? It sounds like the larger illum can manage 3 fps natively, but couldn't find specs on the original lytro.
In practice a lot of surveillance cameras seem to be focused to have the entire scene a blurred mess
Well, the cheapest one is actually $200 as far as I can see, showing results worldwide.
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/brush-in/out points of focus. Alas, all we got were these gimmicky square pictures that you could click to bring various parts to focus.
At least these project of reverse engineering the file format or even the firmware can bring new life to these quirky cameras
I had always hoped for better software to come along. I’ll be curious to see if it can find a second life.
Though it feels like the cameras are in a "pro" or at least "prosumer" race. Every apple camera announcement seems to tout "advances" 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).
The reason we have multiple lenses sticking out of a phone is to achieve similar high image pixel counts at high sensitivity/low noise across wildly different fields of view (say 108 deg, 69 deg, 28 deg) and wildly different per-pixel angular fields of view in a cost effective manner. A single imaging block capable of seeing a whole 108 deg field of view wide camera image with the per-pixel angular field of view of the 28 deg telephoto imager is generally infeasible in a cost effective way unless you are IMAX.
It might be useful for boosting its mediocre resolution, though.
