Very cool. I do always wonder with projects like this that rely heavily on proprietary software, what happens if a few years down the road the company folds? Now do I have a fancy brick to mount on my camera? I was hoping to see a more explicit statement about whether the raw data was still reasonably usable or at least readable outside the proprietary software. That may be the case and I just missed it, but as a potential customer of this the possibility of the lens being useless without their software can be a bit spooky. That having been said the tech looks great and I hope they do really well!
I had one of the first Lytro light field cameras [0], and thats exactly what happened. The camera was essentially bricked and all my photos were deleted from the only cloud platform that could render them.
Luckily, or maybe unluckily, for me the camera ended up taking terrible pictures and no images of any consequence were taken with it.
Don’t worry too much. It looks like this is Bring Your Own Camera so the files are whatever format you’re used to working with.
The algorithm for processing plenoptic images is also well-known and this company is not the first to do it. Someone will come up with a free tool for dealing with these images.
Good point! I’ve been excited to see where light field tech leads on the practical side of things. If indeed they’re able to overcome the resolution limitations using AI assist then this is a great step forward!
