Lytro – Disruptive Technologies
The Lytro camera is the first consumer targeted light field camera. In contrast with any cameras we have today, which capture simple two dimensional photographs, the Lytro uses an array of thousands of microlenses, along with highly complex mathematics, to capture the depth of a scene. As new technologies develop and our interactions with technology adapt to accompany that development, technologies sometimes arise that take over existing markets. These are called disruptive technologies, and a simple, older example of a disruptive technology in photography is the digital camera, which slowly pushed film out of popularity. The makers of the Lytro have been convinced that the light field “images” they are capturing are the future of photography. While there have been many recent major developments in 3-D data acquisition and representation, such as Oculus Rift, Google’s Tango and Cardboard projects, Microsoft’s Kinect, and a medley of other projects, the Lytro hasn’t shown much with regards to the actual data that it is capturing, despite its complexity and potential use. This article states that they are planning to change that with the release of Lytro Platform, a development kit which aims to allow developers to “explore developing custom light field cameras and applications for use cases outside of photography and storytelling.
Disruptive technologies develop in a manner that relates highly to the concept of a tipping point. They begin by creating their own markets through improving products and services in unexpected ways, and then infiltrate the market by eventually dropping prices and gaining popularity. Once a disruptive technology is used by a large enough portion of the population, there is an upward pressure on the demand for that product until it becomes the prevalent technology. Many times, gaining that popularity involves changing the application of technology and dropping prices. Light field technology and cameras have been developing over the last two decades, and Lytro has tackled the latter issue by dropping prices low enough to be a product targeted towards average consumers. While they have experience difficulty changing application, they are now allowing developers to access the information they are acquiring more fully, allowing them to use light fields for applications such as automated driving, facial recognition, and gesture based interfaces. As corporations and R&D teams discover new applications for the technology, the Lytro may become more popular and infiltrate photography, eventually entirely replacing the digital camera.
http://petapixel.com/2014/11/06/lytro-branches-photography-offers-unprecedented-access-tech-20k/