alt Hacker NewsI remember Lytro. There was a lot of fanfare behind that company and then they fizzled. They had a lauded CEO/founder and their website demonstrated clearly how the post-focus worked. It felt like they were going to be the next camera revolution. Their rise and demise story would make a good Isaacson-style documentary.
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chychiu • today at 9:29 AM
I think the product was just too early for its time, and there is not much demand for it. For what it's worth, the founder (Ren Ng) went back to academia, and was highly instrumental in computer vision research, e.g. being the PI on the paper for NeRF: (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3503250)
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If I recall correctly they got scooped up by Google and their team was merged into various Google teams. I was disappointed to hear of their fizzling as well. They were just starting to dive into serious movie production light field cameras when it happened. They had an incredible tech demo on their website showcasing its power. I can't seem to locate the original but there are bits of it in the linked video.
https://youtu.be/4qXE4sA-hLQ?si=QsEG2PtAmVjIfwDA