Lytro

Lytro
Information
Type	Private (defunct)
Industry	Light field imaging, virtual reality
Founded	2006 (as Refocus Imaging)
Founder	Ren Ng
Headquarters	Mountain View, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Ren Ng (founder, executive chairman), Jason Rosenthal (CEO from 2013)
Products	Lytro Light Field Camera, Lytro Illum, Lytro Immerge, Lytro Cinema, Lytro Volume Tracer

Lytro (Lytro, Inc., originally Refocus Imaging) was an American imaging company in Mountain View, California, that built light field cameras and, in its later years, light field capture and rendering tools for virtual reality video. It was founded by Ren Ng to commercialize his Stanford University doctoral research on light field photography. Its first consumer camera, which let owners refocus a picture after taking it, shipped in 2012.

From 2015 the company moved away from consumer photography toward video and VR. Its Lytro Immerge camera system captured live-action scenes as light fields so that viewers in a headset could move their heads within a small volume and see correct parallax, which ordinary 360-degree video cannot provide. Lytro announced on 27 March 2018 that it was winding down. Press reports described a deal in which Google took on many of its employees and some assets.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every dated fact, figure, price, spec, person, funding round and quote against the cited Stanford, K9 Ventures, Engadget, DPReview, AllThingsD, PetaPixel, UploadVR, TechCrunch, Road to VR and Newsshooter pages. About review dates.

History

Founding and consumer cameras

Ren Ng began his PhD in computer science at Stanford in 2002 and completed it in 2006 with the dissertation "Digital Light Field Photography". His advisors included Pat Hanrahan and Marc Levoy, and the dissertation received a best-dissertation award from the Association for Computing Machinery. During his doctoral work he built a light field camera prototype from a re-engineered medium-format camera, and he founded the company after graduating. In 2006 Ng settled on the name Refocus Imaging. Charles Chi of Greylock led the company's Series A round in 2007 and NEA led its Series B in May 2010. After a Series C with Andreessen Horowitz in May 2011, the company launched publicly as Lytro on 22 June 2011, having raised 50 million US dollars in venture funding.

On 19 October 2011 Lytro unveiled its first product, a pocket-sized light field camera with an 8x optical zoom, an f/2 lens and an 11-megaray light field sensor. It cost 399 US dollars for an 8 GB model (in Electric Blue or Graphite) and 499 US dollars for a 16 GB model (Red Hot). A microlens array between the main lens and the sensor let the camera record the direction of incoming light as well as its intensity, so focus could be chosen after capture. The camera shipped in late February 2012.

In June 2012 Ng moved from chief executive to executive chairman, and Charles Chi served as interim CEO. In March 2013 Lytro named Jason Rosenthal, the former head of Ning, as chief executive; Ng stayed on as executive chairman.

Lytro announced the larger Lytro Illum on 22 April 2014. It had a 40-megaray sensor, a 30-250 mm lens with a constant f/2 aperture, a 4-inch touchscreen and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor. It went on sale on 15 July 2014 for 1,599 US dollars, with a 1,499 US dollar pre-order price.

Shift to video and virtual reality

In February 2015 Lytro raised 50 million US dollars and said it would move its focus from still photography to video and VR. It planned to cut 25 to 50 of its 130 employees while hiring people with skills in those new areas. Rosenthal said that "light-field is really the perfect solution" for capturing VR content.

Lytro announced Lytro Immerge on 4 November 2015. It was an end-to-end system for cinematic VR, made up of a camera array, a server for processing and storage, editing software that worked with tools such as Nuke, and a playback component with positional tracking support. The company said Immerge recorded light field video over a capture volume of about one meter, giving six degrees of freedom playback inside that space, and planned to give prototypes to content creators in the first quarter of 2016. By early 2017 the original spherical design had been reworked into a planar, front-facing rig that captured a full 360-degree scene by filming different directions one after another.

In April 2016 Lytro introduced Lytro Cinema, a light field system for film and television. The company described its sensor as 755 raw megapixels at up to 300 frames per second, with a data rate of 400 gigabytes per second. Rental packages started at 125,000 US dollars. Lytro showed the system at the NAB Show later that month, with sample footage intercut with material from an Arri Alexa.

On 15 February 2017 Lytro closed a 60 million US dollar Series D round led by Blue Pool Capital, with EDBI, Foxconn, Huayi Brothers and Barry Sternlicht among the participants. Rosenthal said the company wanted to "define the production pipeline, technologies and quality standards for an entire next generation of content." At the same time Lytro announced a partnership with the VR studio Within, co-founded by Chris Milk.

Wind-down

On 20 March 2018 TechCrunch reported, citing unnamed sources, that Google was buying Lytro for about 40 million US dollars (one source put the figure at 25 million) in what was described as an asset sale. The report said Lytro had raised just over 200 million US dollars in total, had been valued at about 360 million US dollars after its 2017 round, and held 59 patents related to light field and digital imaging. On 27 March 2018 Lytro said in a statement: "It has been an honor and a pleasure to contribute to the cinema and Virtual Reality communities, but starting today we will not be taking on new productions or providing professional services as we prepare to wind down the company." According to The Verge's reporting, as summarized by DPReview and Road to VR, the arrangement was closer to a hiring deal than a company acquisition. A large fraction of Lytro's staff went to Google, spread across several divisions, and Google had no plans to continue Lytro's camera work. Lytro's photo-sharing service had already been shut down in December 2017.

Products

Product	Announced	Type	Notes
Lytro Light Field Camera	19 October 2011	Consumer light field camera	11-megaray sensor, 8x zoom, f/2 lens; 399 US dollars (8 GB) or 499 US dollars (16 GB); shipped late February 2012
Lytro Illum	22 April 2014	Consumer light field camera	40-megaray sensor, 30-250 mm f/2 lens, 4-inch touchscreen; 1,599 US dollars; on sale 15 July 2014
Lytro Immerge	4 November 2015	Light field VR capture system	Camera array, server, editing software and player; about one meter capture volume for 6DoF playback
Lytro Cinema	April 2016	Light field cinema camera system	755 raw megapixels at up to 300 fps; rental from 125,000 US dollars
Lytro Volume Tracer	October 2017	Light field rendering software	Generates light fields from pre-rendered CG scenes for playback on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Lytro Immerge 2.0	November 2017	Light field VR capture system	95 cameras, 120-degree field of view (up from 90), three rotations for a 360-degree capture (down from five)

XR work

Lytro's VR pitch rested on the difference between light field capture and conventional stereo 360-degree video. A standard 360 video is filmed from one fixed point, so the image does not change when the viewer leans or moves. A light field camera array records many views of the same scene, which lets software reconstruct its shape and show a limited amount of head movement with correct parallax.

Hallelujah, a roughly five-minute piece created by the VR film studio Within, was shot with Immerge. In it singer Bobby Halvorson performs Leonard Cohen's song while copies of him sing accompanying parts, and a church choir behind him later joins in. Within released it through the Within app on 22 September 2017. Road to VR noted that this public version was mastered from the light field capture but rendered as 360-degree video, and that a fully volumetric version had no release date at the time. Alongside Immerge 2.0, Lytro showed a remastered Hallelujah at 5K per eye, up from 3.5K, and said the system was ready for 10K per eye once headsets could display it.

Volume Tracer, announced in October 2017, applied the same approach to computer-generated content. It placed many virtual cameras inside a scene's viewing volume so that offline renderers such as V-Ray, Arnold, Maxwell and RenderMan could produce light field samples. The result kept view-dependent effects such as specular highlights, reflections and refractions, and played back at 90 frames per second with positional tracking. Lytro demonstrated it with One Morning, an animated short directed by former Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas.

In December 2017 Lytro described light fields as a master format for immersive media: content would be captured once and then delivered at different quality levels, from 6DoF playback in location-based venues down to desktop VR, mobile devices and flat 360-degree video. For Hallelujah the company gave data rates of 0.5 TB per minute for in-venue 6DoF playback, 2.7 GB per minute for desktop, 2.5 GB per minute for tablet and mobile, and 9.8 MB per minute for 360 video. At the time it expected public releases through partners in the first quarter of 2018. Three months later the company announced that it was winding down.

See also

• Light field
• Lytro Immerge
• Volumetric video
• Virtual Reality Camera