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Google Is Buying Innovative Camera Startup Lytro For $40 Million (techcrunch.com)
According to TechCrunch, Google is acquiring Lytro, the imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR. From the report: One source described the deal as an "asset sale" with Lytro going for no more than $40 million. Another source said the price was even lower: $25 million and that it was shopped around -- to Facebook, according to one source; and possibly to Apple, according to another. A separate person told us that not all employees are coming over with the company's technology: some have already received severance and parted ways with the company, and others have simply left. Assets would presumably also include Lytro's 59 patents related to light-field and other digital imaging technology. The sale would be far from a big win for Lytro and its backers. The startup has raised just over $200 million in funding and was valued at around $360 million after its last round in 2017, according to data from PitchBook. Its long list of investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Foxconn, GSV, Greylock, NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and many more. Rick Osterloh, SVP of hardware at Google, sits on Lytro's board. A pricetag of $40 million is not quite the exit that was envisioned for the company when it first launched its camera concept, and in the words of investor Ben Horowitz, "blew my brains to bits."
company raised lots of startup capital and sold for cheap, who cares
..a "Take Under" back in the dot-com bust days. Good times.
Seems to me pretty soon only a select few (read: humongous) companies will own/run everything.
AC comments get piped to
I had a feeling they were going to be acquired by someone, it could've been worse than Google. Google's more likely to license the patents and tech than to sit on it all and make it exclusive to Google platforms. Cardboard/Daydream have decent penetration in the VR marketplace, but I can't see Google making lightfield videos exclusive to those. Facebook/Oculus has enough games/experiences 'exclusive' to their platform that they might've done that, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
More like fake innovation startup created for the purpose of selling the name.
At a sale value of just $40M, the company had nothing real that created value. Basically vaporware
I can't say I'm surprised... as I said back in 2012, when Lytro first hit the market:
I knew the end was approaching a year or two ago when they started dumping their cameras on Amazon far below their original MSRP. Hmm... Looked at their website for the first time in forever, and they don't even talk about their consumer equipment anymore.
I bought one of their early models for $79 a few years ago. It is funny-looking - a rectangular box about the size of a hot-dog - but is intriguing for its possibilities. The image you get actually includes depth information. One of the fun things you can do is create a 3-D image from the single-lens shot.
But it was a bit of a sham. Their '40 megaray' camera had an actual still image equivalent resolution of 0.4 megapixels
That's inherent to the technology.
The whole idea behind this light field photography, is that the 40mega pixel sensors receives an array of ~1000 (a matrix of 16x16) sub images.
That gives you ~400k pixels per sub-image, but the final image that you get out isn't just on of the 400k pixel of the image, it's what you get by doing computations based on all the 40m pixels that the sensors captured.
That's why the 400k pixels aren't much relevant (they weren't kept "hidden in a conspiracy", they where mostly non relevant to the quality of the image).
That's also why they definitely cannot call the 40mege pixel of the sensors "40 mega pixels", because they won't directly translate into pixels of the final image (unlike a classical camera).
It's artificially generated picture which use an array of 40 million of data point to infer it.
Hence the funny "40 mega rays" name.
Now whether this is useful and can be actually leveraged for the en user ?
meh...
Probably not in the current form (big expensive camera, as huge and heavy as top DSLR, but producing less high quality pics, but with the added gimmick that you can do the focus *in-post* instead of before taking the picture) - it was basically a technological curiosity wrapped in a way to much expensive shell.
But it can *definitely* have some success in *smartphones*.
No matter how much high you pump the number of (theoretical) pixels in the sensor, there's only so much light that can cover a given surface.
Current smartphones are hitting physical len limitations hard (even more so because they have even thinner bodies).
Light field photography could be also away to get more image quality out of thin smartphone bodies (Instead of have 1 or 2 pinholes over corresponding tiny sensors, future smartphone could have a huge area at the back of the phone covered by a whole array of micro lens. Think the combined dual-camera tendency turned up to eleven) and doing the focusing in post-processing being as common as picking up instagram filters.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Light field camera sensor is probably a necessary precursor for an Eyetap HMD, as the AREMAC display probably needs knowledge about the scene to adjust focus more accurately.