To my mind their mistake was not having an open source library that could work with their capture format, including basic support for focusing and producing an output image for display.
Pretty much every new photography tech has had a community of amateurs and professionals spring up around it and (hopefully) innovate.
They missed out on that; all we got was the fun-for-a-few-minutes clicking around thing, which gets old pretty fast.
Oh, now you are making me wistful for what might have been.
If they'd had any kind of library or API, I could have played around with my Ken Burns idea by writing a few lines of code!
I've seen this same mistake over and over again going back to the earliest days of GUI apps: designing the user experience with hardcoded interactions instead of building the UI on top of a public API that enables others to create and experiment with their own interactions.
With careful and laborious use of Photoshop it’s possible to do most anything today, but with a light-field image there are a lot of creative controls that could be made easier, faster, and more reliable. (Of course, doing this properly would take hiring some signal processing gurus, color scientists, professional photo retouchers, and interface designers, and spending years on semi-open-ended research.)
The tech was really interesting to photographers and I absolutely think it could be adopted if built into a reasonable camera design. It’s very normal for photographers to carry many cameras and I knew people to carry Lyros some but I think some of it was that the company had two different users if was designing for, which isn’t usually a problem with cameras but this was so different and novelty that it mattered. I really think if they just made super nerdy products without trying to satisfy the cell phone crowd, they could have built a niche following in photographers.
But it wasn't a very good camera, and they completely missed the boat on making it a storytelling tool.
I took my Lytro with me when I walked with Team Torani (the Italian syrup people) in the Columbus Day parade that year, and did not get even one good shot. I wished I'd brought my little point-and-shoot instead, or just about any other camera, because I would have gotten dozens of good shots.
The pitch at the time was "you can put your photos on lytro.com, and people who view your gallery can click anywhere to refocus!" But who wants to do that? If you're looking at a gallery of photos, do you want to go clicking around to bring different things in and out of focus? I don't.
But for a photographer, this had some potential as a storytelling tool. Imagine having a photo that would do its own "pull focus" [1] when you view it, like in the movies. The photographer could first focus on one subject and then have it slowly change focus to something else to reveal something new to the person viewing the photo. Kind of a Ken Burns effect [2] but in the focus plane instead of - or perhaps in addition to - panning and zooming.
I remember one photo I got at the Menlo Park street fair that would have lent itself to this. I had the camera down around knee height, and a dog came up with his nose inches from the lens. In the background was his owner, an attractive young lady. It was a nice shot, and I imagined having it start with the dog's nose in focus and then gradually pulling the focus back to the owner.
Granted, this wasn't much of a story, but it was something. I couldn't even do that. All I could do on lytro.com was set the initial focus, and then leave it to any viewers to go clicking around to fiddle with the focus themselves. But nobody wants to do that.
It seemed like an opportunity lost, because they were so focused (pun intended) on the amazing technology and not on how to use it to tell stories.
[1] https://vimeo.com/233143268
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect