Will Lytro really start a photographic revolution?

Despite getting caught up in the excitement and pure wow-factor of the Lytro camera previews currently getting a lot of attention on the webs, I’m suspicious of the hugeness of the claims, and I’m struggling to figure out what it is they will actually deliver.

And the claims are fairly nebulous at times. They call the images “living pictures”. Techcrunch writes that “Lytro is developing a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s”. Watch the Techcrunch interview with Ren Ng (Lytro CEO and founder) and you’ll hear talk of “camera 3.0” and light-field photography.

And then Ng makes this statement:

Light-field technology enables something like a Lytro camera to take all the information about the light flowing into the camera … The definition of it is the amount of light traveling in every direction in every point in space … You can sort of picture that light field and all the directions flowing into the camera …

Whoa! That’s some pretty impressive sci-fi shit going on there. All the light? Every direction? Every point in space? Suddenly I’m thinking about the film Deja Vu and its spacefolding technology that (apparently) records all of human existence as a constant video stream — imagine an infinite number of CCTV cameras in the sky. Amazing! Freaky! Preposterous!

What we actually see on the Lytro website are some fairly impressive (but more down-to-earth) demos of a new kind of ‘focus-independent’ photography. The camera captures all objects in focus, and the user can click in an image to pull focus between foreground and background objects. (Try it out on the image below.)

This is pretty amazing stuff, but it’s not sci-fi, it’s not Denzel Washington snooping through people’s homes or preventing ferry disasters with a magic all-seeing eye.

I’m not trying to say that Lytro are intentionally misleading us; this is all pretty standard publicity hype, and they don’t actually lie about anything. All the talk about light-streams, points in space and 3D, however, do seem to point at a bigger picture (oops, pun definitely not intended) that the current demo web images don’t deliver. Putting it simply, it all seems to be about focus and depth of field. Ng talks about 3D capabilities, but how much of this can we eventually expect to see? And what about other data? Will the camera also capture a range of luminance and exposure data? What about the resolution? If it’s really just about depth of field, then it’s a great gimmick, but not a revolution.

Thanks, then, to The Economist’s Babbage blog for taking a step back and putting Lytro’s product in perspective, locating it in a wider trend towards computational photography, of which there are many existing examples, such as high dynamic range (HDR) imaging.

The basic premise is to use multiple exposures, and even multiple lenses, to capture information from which photographs may be derived. These data contain a raft of potential pictures which software then converts into what, at first blush, looks like a conventional photo.

So really, it’s all about the data and the algorithms. As ever, in trying to report on and market complex technological developments, the media and the tech companies themselves chop the big picture into manageable chunks, and flog them to us via attention-grabbing headlines and shiny gadgets. What’s changing is that our photos need no longer be one frozen set of pixels, but a potential mountain of data from which dozens of radically different images can be generated.

By all accounts Lytro could play a significant part in getting an entirely new photographic product to the consumer. But let’s not get too fixated on one new product. The revolution, if it exists, is that computational photography is now entering the mainstream. It’ll be interesting to see how the trend develops.