In short, Lytro is developing a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s. Rather than just capturing one plane of light, it captures the entire light field around a picture, all in one shot taken on a single device. A light field includes every beam of light in every direction at every point in time. Experimentation in this field started in the mid-1990s at Stanford with 100 cameras in one room. Lytro’s innovation is making it small enough to fit in your pocket. Really.
As a result you can refocus photos after the fact, wiggle around the orientation, and even show the photos in 3D. Get excited, Jason Kincaid, because it’s not too far away from those 3D moving photographs in the Harry Potter movies. The company has raised $50 million so far from NEA, K9 Ventures, Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.
Check it out in this photo below by Richard Koci Hernandez. Click around to see Elvis come into focus in the foreground:
Of course there are big risks with any business this jaw-droppingly innovative. Will they be able to get the price point low enough that people will buy the camera? Right now, the closest Ng will commit on price is somewhere between north of $1 and less than $10,000. That’s a pretty broad ballpark. We won’t be able to see the devices until the also vague “sometime this year.” An equally important question is whether the user experience be as simple as the company claims.
We invited the CEO and founder Ren Ng into the TechCrunchTV studio to answer some of these questions, give us a demo and tell us more about this undeniably cool company. Video below.
Hi, this is Sarah Lacey of TechCrunch TV. I'm here with Ren Ong, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Litro, that most people say sounds like it is a scam, when they first hear about it.
Well, it's I think, a little bit hard to believe but it's absolutely true. We're developing an amazing new kind of camera, that will forever change how we all take and experience pictures.
Now your invest, one of your investors, Ben Horowitz says this is the first time that picture making has been changed since 1826. Do you think this is as, you know, as equal a job in picture making from film to digital, do you think it's broader than that? I think it's as big a jump as from film to digital and I think the implications are much larger.
Because, you know, from film to digital, at the end of the day, they're still recording the same, data, the same 2D photograph and when Ben's talking about that he's saying, which is actually right that all the way back from the 1820's to the data type in the 1830's, it's the same 2D picture. At Litro, we're working on this next big innovation in cameras, sometimes we call it Camera 3.0, where it's about recording this fundamentally More powerful kind of data, very different than a photo, that enables breakthrough features and its expensive possibilities in picture taking.
And the name for that kind of data is a Light Field.
most decorated people in the field. And the original research has proven to be one of the most influential, important ideas of all time in computer graphics and computer vision. The Light Field is, you know, Light Field technology enables something like a litro camera to take all the information about the light flowing to the camera.
So the higher dimensional information that is lost and not recorded in a regular photograph. The definition of it is, you know, the amount of light direction and every point in space. So can get a picture that light field and all those directions flowing into the camera and being recorded by Light Field camera rather than a regular camera.
That's the difference for us.
So, your real innovation is taking this from something that used to be able to be done with hundreds of cameras in a room to a single camera and a single shot and the real innovation Here's the sensor, is that right?
That's a part of it, and you're absolutely right. So, it used to be, you know, a hundred cameras, that's a second generation camera system in Stanford was. Well, you know, this light feel concept is, is so powerful, but how do we capture these things? So, they had a hundred cameras in a room, hundred cameras plugged into a super computer, all working together, taking many pictures, say of you, at the same time, and maybe we can patch all those things together to back this light feel.
Incredibly influential work, the gentleman that did that for his PhD works at Litro now, then at Wilburn. But not very practical for every day people.
Right. Most of us don't carry a hundred cameras.
Yeah, you know, a bandwagon of cameras is not something you can fit in your pocket. So, for my PhD, I was working with these, two professors at Stanford. I was interested in how we can miniaturize the room full of cameras into a single camera, single shot, to make this practical for everyone. And you asked me about the sensor, the key to the miniaturization is a new kind of sensor.
This innovative light feel sensor replaces the regular camera sensor and.takes that light field flowing into the camera body, and normally where it would make the photograph, will record the full light field itself.
Well, lets look at some of the things that you can do with that and we can talk a little bit more about the company.
Sure. That sounds great. So light field cameras have many amazing abilities, including the ability to actually focus pictures after we take the shot. What you see here, let me back up for a second, the camera records this data. The question is, it's not a photograph, so how do you get the photograph?
We have a light field engine that forms pictures from that light-fielding software. It will it be on the camera, on the PC as you see here and when it travels, the picture travels through the web the light field engine goes with it which makes it really a, you know, easy to use, simple experience so people [xx].
OK.
So this is more on what the pictures look like. I think we've all taken a picture like this at some point. You know, where oops, it gets focused on the background and on these mountains instead of on this boy's face.
Mm-hm.
And I took this picture in Norway, in the Fjords. And I think we're all familiar with how much is lost in a person's expression when it's not focused on right there.
Right And the amazing this is we can change No one wants to frame that.
Yeah, right, exactly. But it would o this railing here or icture now is really just made. So from far to close, and of course, if we can do this we can make everything in focus at the same time. Another thing you can get from a light field camera is immersive 3-D. Folks, I think, have probably gone to the theaters and see 3-D movies with glasses on, and with the 3-D TV, as you saw, we can really have 3-D in full glory.
Right.
Well, the thing is like, you know, on a regular display like 3-D even here without glasses for the folks watching the video because we can actually change the perspective in this scene after taking the shot.
So, over time could you develop something like the photos in the Harry Potter movie?
Yes, exactly, I mean the ability to change
--would love that because he's a Harry Potter nuts..
Yes, I think many of us are really captured by that idea of a newspaper with a living picture in it. And that's what we call these pictures. It's a living picture because capturing the light field preserves a bit of life for...
Right.
...you to see something later.
Right. What I think is interesting about what you guys are offering is, you kind of have some thing across a spectrum. You have you know, for people who are really into sort of the 3-D thing, something sort of very cool and, you know for people like me or my parents who think oh, 3-D's kind of a gimmick.
You have a very practical application, too, which is like refocusing, taking in low light Right, exactly.
When you, I know you guys are sort of at the prototype stage now, but ultimately, who are you positioning this product for? Like an everyday consumer or more of like the kind of geeked-out nerd doing different ones? yeah, a very high end device?
Our strategy is to introduce light field technology for everyone in the form of a consumer light field camera. And it's going to be competitively priced as a consumer camera. And we transformativeIt 's not about something that's really advance or complicated to be product design. You know, in our research, we're sharing from users that cameras are just still really complicated right now they have all these modes, dials, and ISO settings.
It's really hard to take pictures simply. So people want simple, simple, simple. They want fast to capture those fleeting moments. And they want to see something new, something, you know, visually magical when they share pictures with their friends and families. Folks are seeing that today because you know, if you share a picture in Facebook like last year, 60 billion photos were shared in Facebook alone and nobody saw a shot that was like, "Wow, Sarah, that was a really great picture of you.
Your husband must have bought that new, Canon, low light..." Right.
...VSI, 14 megapixel camera. I mean, it's just not going to happen because new cameras are taking pictures that look the same as in the past. The living pictures that you saw, that you see here, are something that we're designing so that when they go through the web all your friends and family will see it in social networks, in mobile, in a way where they don't have to install any software.
And they can experience living pictures for themselves.
Right. And show us what you're planning to do with social networks...
Sure, yeah.
...in particular. You know, I think what's interesting about getting, I mean, this is a pretty big consumer adoption ship that you're talking about. But what's great about photos is it's inherently viral unlike other things. You can appreciate it without actually going and buying a camera yourself.
Right. Humans are such just, you know, I think we are such visual animals have this fundamental need to share our stories through pictures. a Facebook news feed. And what you see here are some of these, you living picture. It's like a little ambassador from the, you know, the pictures that come out of a light field camera.
Where when you look at it after the fact you're like, "Oh, what is this over here?" Right? Actually, this is my fiancee, an what has she got on her fingertips here? And it turns out it's a hermit crab.
Or over here, this is a picture taken by Richard Koci Hernandez. He is a journalism professor at was featured in the New York Times, I think last week. He has 17,000 Instagram followers and he's been using one of the cameras, an early engineering build off our assembly line, of the product, and exploring what you can do with pictures to tell stories.
And I love this shot he took in his backyard because, I don't know if you can tell what's in here, you know here it's obviously focused on these flowers, but what is going on back there? There's someone there. And if we click to explore, it turns out it's his daughter taking a So these become little ambassadors for the company, out in the living Web.
And, of course, it's our technology, so it takes you directly to information about what is this? Right. Well, that are great shots, Sarah, that you shared.
Right.
It's a new kind of camera, a new kind of technology. And eventually, when the company is launched, you can go and buy one. And even right now, as we launch the company, folks can come in and sign up to learn more about that you want to play with but that is not out yet.
It's not out yet. But the camera, first Litro camera, will be coming out later this year, so it will be in 2011.
Right. And, when you say, it's comparable to other cameras, there's a really big range for what cameras cost. What does that mean?
We're not going into the specifics of the pricing right now. So all I can say is that it is going to be a competitively-priced consumer camera.
I mean is that under, sub thousand dollars? Is it thousands? Is it hundreds? s it $20? I mean those are all massive, massive ranges.
Fair question. CompetitivelyIt means nothing. You priced this camera now between $1 and $10K.
Well, it won't Can you narrow that a little?
I tell you what. It's not going to be $10,000, because $10,000 is not a consumer camera.
Alright. $5000 or under?
Competitively priced consumer camera.
It's going to be $5000. Some people wouldn't say that's competitive. All right. You said you also have a mobile app that ties into this.
We do, yeah.
Tell us - you can share that, but tell us a little about that.
I think what's happened, and one of the things that really enables a company like Vitro today, is that the modern internet just has terrific technology and infrastructure.
Mm -hm.
So you can see something like this on our website, obviously, but also embedded into the newsfeed in Facebook, no software to install. Similarly, in the Facebook app on like an iPhone, you can see these living pictures directly in there. And it is really magical when you can touch on the place that you want to see and then it focuses there after the fact.
I love the story. Our VP Marketing, Kira Wampler (sp?) has her 4-year old.
I was about to say I know the story about a 4-year old is coming out.
Exactly. Anytime the iPad comes up, there's a story about a four-year-old.
Well, that's the thing though, right? I mean, it's that when you can interact with a new kind of picture, it's just a fascinating experience that, you know, children just love it! They can touch to focus. She's like, "Oh, Mommy, let's look at another one." Because Kira's obviously working at home a lot.
And then at some point, she's like, "Well, Mommy, let's look at pictures of me." So they went and looked at a regular album of pictures. And they're going through a few, and then she's like, "Mommy, these pictures are boring." You know? And it really is. It's such a simple little change, but a picture that is a living one that saves a bit of life for later really can just tell pictures in such a more delightful, meaningful way.
Now let's talk just a little bit about the company. You have a ton of well-known people around this company. You've raised $50 million in capital from NEA, Grey Lot, Canine, Andreessen Horowitz - a lot of big name investors. That's a lot of money! Has it taken that much money to get to this point?
Well, a lot of the capital is fresh. We just closed our Series C in May. And I think we've raised a judicious amount for being able to take a new consumer electronics company to market. You know, I think that a lot of things have changed in the world today over the last 5-10 years to enable a modern company like Vitro.
We talked about one which is modern web to distribute this new kinds of pictures in the way that folks can really get it and without That's one part. The other part is, you got to make these things, right? Well, the second piece is that the world infrastructure has matured such manufacturing cameras.
We leverage on top of that, but we're not just repackaging all, you know, autoshop technology. A lot of it is off the shelf and repackaged which is low cost, terrific, but we also have this new kind of sensor that goes in the product. Right? I mean, 10 years ago, you would have to go to Salomon stores, which is very costly, really prohibitive for start-ups, and that's been something that has really established the big brands, right, for consumer electronics, as something that it's hard for, you know, start-ups to get into.
But that's really I mean the force with which internet sales and inter-internet distribution of products has moved, I think it's been really surprising to many people. Even three to four years ago, there may have been a question around, you know, how, whether you could just launch a product through Amazon.
Today it's almost common place, I think.
So these big nd on top of that, we built, of course, a world class team with all the pieces that you need, sources of expertise that you need to bring the technology to market.
So, what's the real risk for this company? I mean, technically, you've shown you can do this. You know, as, as, investors that I talked to earlier today said that like, you know, the team seems to be all in place. Is the risk that keeps, is it price point? Is it getting into something where people want to buy this thing that's worth while?
Is it marketing? Is it whether or not consumers want to adopt us?
I think there's a lot of moving parts to make a consumer electronics company successful. And so, I think it's the combination of all of these things brought together to bring this product out in a way they can really resonate. That is important and that's why The core light filled technology in competition photography, and brain thrust there that we have, but also consumer product design, right?
Simple, simple, simple, fast, magical. That is a really important way for us to differentiate and very important that we get that right. Consumer marketing obviously, high volume manufactured distribution. We have world class team that is, terrifically And all the moving parts need to come together for us to get this product out the door.
Well, I have to say, it's exciting to have to see some company in the photo world that it's not just another iPhone photo sharing app.
Oh, thank you so much. We're really excited about the opportunity to change how we all take and experience these pictures
Love photos but utterly bored by wave after wave of iPhone photo sharing apps? Lytro is the company for you. This is also the company for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has fallen into a rut of innovation-less posing. And it’s the company for anyone who complains that the Valley is more about media and marketing than brass-knuckles, hardcore technology. This is the company that jaded, cranky, rap-lyric quoting investor Ben Horowitz says, “blew my brains to bits.”
