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.

Apple and the TV rumours: how does this fit the ‘bigger picture’?

Another day, another Apple product rumour. This one has been circulating for a while, and the latest instalment updates the thread with anonymous comments by an alleged former Apple executive.

So what’s the gist of the speculation? In brief: Apple might launch it’s own line of TVs. And, to be clear, we’re not talking here about the existing AppleTV product — the little black set-top box — but actual television sets with (depending which rumours you listen to) some combination of iTunes and current AppleTV functionality built in.

I’m not concerned here with probing the history of the rumours or the validity of individual claims. I’m much more interested in how something like an Apple endorsed TV fits into their big picture.

Why would Apple produce a product like this? The current AppleTV has always been considered a fairly minor product, once branded a ‘hobby’ by Steve Jobs, and even considered a commercial failure by many. Me, I love the AppleTV, and it’s unfair to brand it a failure. It merely seems that way when compared with its outrageously successful siblings (iPhone, iPad, et al). I am very impatient to see things get going with the platform, though. (Why on earth is it taking so long to get some serious functionality or third party apps off the ground? It’s embarrassing the way Apple is lagging behind competitors like Boxee and Plex. But I digress.)

Even with the sluggishness in the development of the AppleTV box, it still seems inevitable that it will follow some kind of iPhone-esque trajectory — major software updates, apps, all that. With the launch of the AppleTV 2 the decision to move to streaming-only and build the system on iOS suggests as much. It points to expanded functionality and connectivity, and surely the temptation to open another app store goldmine will be just too much to resist. But all this can be done with the existing AppleTV box — what would be gained by producing essentially the same product with a flat screen monitor bolted on?

One reason could be that TVs sell better than set-top boxes. Everyone needs a TV, but fewer people are interested in plugging in yet another box, especially if the little box ostensibly only offers them a new way to rent films. The considerations are complex here, and I’ll admit I do not have figures and research to back this up — I’m really just speculating. But it seems a no-brainer that — long term — most consumers would respond better to a big shiny flat screen than a largely mystifying little black box. What’s more it would place Apple more firmly in people’s living rooms. It would be a high profile, politic way of showing consumers, manufacturers and content providers alike the seriousness of their intent in the arena. The arena in question being content provision — films and TV programmes. That’s where the big money is to be made, and fits Apple’s bigger picture in a way that simply flogging shiny flat-screens does not.

So what about this bigger picture? Apple don’t just plug holes in the the tech market. Many tech companies — and manufacturers in general — will find a gap that could be exploited and try to plug it with their product. They shift boxes. The boxes don’t need to be related, they don’t need to play nicely together, they don’t need to be part of a broader scheme. But all of Apple’s major products do fit into a scheme. The Mac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iOS, OS X, iLife, iCloud … all of them fit a pattern of connectivity, a hub for our digital lives. The dream is to have them, and all their descendants, playing and talking happily and effortlessly together, forever, in the iCloud. (A dream that’s tremendously appealing, but also a little scary. But more of this another time.) What would an Apple television add to the dream that the AppleTV box doesn’t?

In the recent WWDC 2011 keynote speech, mention of the AppleTV box and it’s integration with iCloud was sketchy and underwhelming. Even though the intention to bring AppleTV into the fluffy iCloud universe is surely there, there’s still no guarantee it will happen.

I’m really not making any full-blown predictions here. It feels unlikely that Apple will release a television, but if it does happen, I’ll be surprised yet delighted. I may even buy one. But it seems that — unless it’s backed up by upgraded software and app store integration — it would never be a ‘real’ Apple product, merely a luxury, hobby product akin to the current AppleTV box. In fact — going with the feel of the thing again — even if they do launch an AppleTV app store, I’m not convinced an Apple television set would be anything like a classic, enduring Apple product, in the iMac, iPod or iPhone mould.

As always, the far more interesting questions surround this bigger picture. What will Apple do to the delivery of video, TV and film onto our devices and into our living rooms? Will they ‘revolutionise’ the industry, the way the iPod and iTunes has with music, the way the iPhone has with telephony and mobile computing?

UPDATE, 26 August 2011 Interesting article on thenextweb.com about the rumour that Apple is developing “new technology” for TV distribution: “Is a lot of this based on just conjecture? Absolutely. But it sure would be nice to see Tim Cook announce at some point in the near future that the Apple TV isn’t just a hobby anymore.”