Ren Ng's Lytro Set to Revolutionize Photography

Ren Ng's Lytro camera does what not even the smartest, most expensive digital camera can do — focus a picture that was taken out of focus.

Ren Ng’s Lytro camera does what not even the smartest, most expensive digital camera can do — focus a picture that was taken out of focus.

The idea for a camera that records light fields rather than a two-dimensional collection of dead pixels came to Ng when he was studying light fields as a Stanford PhD student. The difficulty of focusing his new digital SLR on his active 5-year-old daughter inspired Ng to consider the practicality of a cameras that can record all the light field data needed to allow an image to be resolved to the desired focal plane after the photo is taken. Such a camera would eliminate even the need to focus a picture.

Ng’s investigation into the feasibility of a practical light-field (or plenoptics) camera grew into his 200-page PhD dissertation titled Digital Light Field Photography. Submitted in July 2006, the dissertation was intriguing enough win the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for best thesis in computer science and engineering. It also won Stanford University’s Arthur Samuel Award for Best Ph.D. Dissertation.

The dissertation’s biggest fan proved to be Ng himself. He decided the work would form the basis for a venture to build and market a consumer plenoptics camera. On the strength of the dissertation, Ng attracted $80 million in venture funding for Lytro. The company has already put prototype plenoptics cameras into the hands of a number of testers who have been capturing light-field images that probably represent the future of digital photography. By clicking on any point of an image, a viewer can refocus the image onto the focal plane of any pictured object. Ng expects to start marketing the camera in time for the 2011 holiday season.

“The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth,” Ng says. “It’s taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you’re throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels. Light fields can use all that resolution, those megapixels, harness them, and drive them into the future.”

Instead of capturing superflous megapixels of data from a sensor recording a scene through a single lens, the Lytro plenoptics camera captures data from an array of small lenses positioned at various angles above the sensor. That angular information associated with each individual pixel can be used to extrapolate an image that is focused on a subject’s face, for example, instead of the roses in front of it, thereby giving viewers access to a “living picture”.

“There’s something about light field photography that’s just magical,” Ng says. “It very much is photography as we’ve known it. It’s what we’ve always seen through cameras — we just had to fix it. We’ve had these kind of pictures floating on our retinas, for as long as we’ve been humans.”

Each image data file comes packaged with HTML5, Flash and other native app technologies needed to perform the necessary calculations to derive the pixels as they appear when an image is focused on a viewer’s desired focal plane, making each image as accessible to a viewer as any digital image except with the added versatility.

Ren Ng, 31, is an avid rock climber. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and a B.S. in mathematical and computational science from Stanford University.