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Lytro cinema

Several tech sites are now reporting Google plans to acquire light field pioneer Lytro. Speculation is that Google will leverage Lytro'due south impressive engineering team to advance its development of VR solutions. That makes a great bargain of sense, although there are other reasons this deal volition provide some value for Google. Unfortunately for Lytro's investors, the purchase toll is rumored to exist between $25 meg and $40 million, far less than the $210 1000000 invested in Lytro since Ren Ng founded information technology as Refocus Imaging.

Google Gets Serious About VR Content

Lytro Immerge conceptual renderingRecently, Google hired content creation superstar and all-around great guy Paul Debevec to assist with its VR efforts. His team released their first public demo this calendar week. If you have a VR headset, information technology provides you with a glimpse of what is possible using light field cameras. Instead of having a fixed 360-degree image effectually you, you tin can move your head and look around things, while shadows and reflections runway perfectly. In his blog mail service announcing the demo, Debevec also provides an excellent explanation of how the system works.

The first question asked nigh the demo was "How is this different from Lytro?" And the answer is that Lytro wants to do the same thing, except with actual video capture instead of patiently synthetic still scenes. It has demoed prototypes of both planar and rotating arrays of cameras that can create immersive worlds. These are of particular interest to Hollywood special furnishings houses, since they can much more easily add virtual creations to a video that includes a full three-dimensional scene than they can to a traditional 2D or even conventional 3D video.

Don't Forget About Phones

Another possible reason to learn Lytro and its technology is to advance the development of computational imaging in Google's smartphones and camera-equipped appliances. One of Ng'southward mentors at Stanford, Marc Levoy, is now at Google working on exactly that. As smartphones move to multiple cameras working together to provide advanced imaging capabilities, ranging from false Bokeh to facial recognition, they move slowly closer to capturing light fields. Lytro'south pioneering piece of work in that expanse has resulted in dozens of patents, which Google would as well presumably become as office of an acquisition.

Lytro Illum light field camera, backside and screen

A Bittersweet Catastrophe for a Radically Innovative Visitor

Lytro has come up a long mode from its initial vision of revolutionizing consumer photography with a camera that permit you focus subsequently the fact. That strategy itself was not necessarily Lytro's first pick, simply similar Foveon before it, licensing its technology to existing photographic camera manufacturers proved nearly incommunicable. When the consumer camera fizzled, Lytro pivoted to a more than professional model, the Illum, but simply succeeded in puzzling the marketplace. Finally, Lytro moved into VR capture for the motility motion picture industry. It has produced some amazing prototypes and some incredible demo videos, simply is short on existent deployments.

For investors, this deal is certainly making the best of a tough situation. For employees, it's a mixed bag. Some are reportedly already being permit go, while others will no incertitude be energized past having the stability and resources of Google at their disposal going forward.