I spent a couple years of my life working on a light field motion picture camera (and got named on two patents) as part of my former work, so I’ve been interested in light field photography and computational photography more generally. The company Lytro was basically the first to market such a device, and recently they were discontinued. Because of that, they were pretty cheap on woot.com, and I couldn’t resist picking one up. It arrived today.

Here’s my first picture. Try clicking on it in various places, or clicking on it and dragging a bit.

I may do a video review of the product, not so much as a product, but basically as an introduction to light field photography, which I still think is interesting, even though the technology isn’t quite their yet.

Stay tuned.

Addendum: The Lytro Meltdown site documents the Wifi protocol for the camera, which means that I might be able to hack together some python code to extract the images from the camera. I might use the Raspberry Pi to experiment. Basically, the camera creates a private wifi network, which you can connect to. Once on that network, you connect to the camera and issue commands over special ports, in a bizarre format. Why they didn’t choose to use HTTP? That’s why the product is no doubt discontinued.