Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by Stratoscope on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @04:39AM
(#16636418)
> 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.
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.
Re:Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M
by nbush on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @11:11AM
(#16638671)
Reading your parent comment and the replies has me kind of dumbfounded at the wasted potential. Did they ever address these ideas directly? Would opening up the format in even the most limited ways (like focus) have exposed the IP?
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.