Lytro Cinema

[ TechCrunch ] Lucas Matney:

Today, the company introduced Lytro Cinema, which is the company’s effort to woo those in the television and film industries with cool camera technology that makes their jobs easier.

The Lytro Cinema camera gathers a truly staggering amount of information on the world around it. The 755 RAW megapixel 40K resolution, 300 FPS camera takes in as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data.

Lytro is a company in the business of capturing light fields. What’s a light field? According to Wikipedia:

The light field is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The direction of each ray is given by the 5D plenoptic function, and the magnitude of each ray is given by the radiance.

What that means to me is a light field is light plus the direction the light is going. Capturing a light field means capturing depth information in addition to all the information a normal image sensor captures. Another way for me to understand capturing light fields is that with the Lytro Cinema 3D VR spaces are being captured.

Lytro is pivoting from consumer electronics to professional with the Lytro Cinema, which gives filmmakers flexibility not available before and allows for changing shutter speeds, the dynamic range, focus position, depth of field, etc. after footage has been captured. Amazing.