Things have been pretty quiet for Lytro news since last spring, when our coverage of the Lytro Cinema Camera release was one of our most popular videos ever. Finally, as we are about to enter 2018, Lytro is back with details of the new Immerge 2.0, following up the original Immerge camera from 2015. If you don't remember, this is a light field camera, meaning it's designed to capture the entire field of light in front of the unit. While originally this was used for applications like refocusing in post, Lytro quickly moved on to a radical re-thinking of capture, with reframing, refocusing, and repositioning the camera all possible in post-production due to the innovative method of capturing images.
The 2.0 version remains just as large as before (see our header image of the camera next to a grown man), but has a a few key improvements on top of a host of smaller revisions to the software underpinning the system. The biggest change is in the field of view that the camera captures. The 1.0 captured a 90° field of view in front of the unit, while the new 2.0 expands that to a 120° field of view by alternating the direction the rows of cameras face. This larger field of view allows greater room for actors to work, or potentially could make 360° capture easier by only requiring only three units instead of four or five. The platform is currently preparing to create imagery at up to 10K resolution per eye, and the company is hoping headset makers will catch up soon to the quality of the content they are capable of producing.
Credit: Lytro
We are likely still years away from Lytro showing up frequently on a film set near you, but it does show us that work continues on the platform. Among the contenders for "future of cinema," light field capture is one with a lot of push behind it for its ability to combine the "moving in space" elements of rendered VR with live capture, and we're glad to see that the company is still pushing forward. Hopefully this means we'll be seeing more about the Lytro Cinema Camera in the near future as well.
Credit: Lytro
