Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able capture, beyond the demos of "what if you could fix your focus after shooting" of back then.

Beyond high tech, there's a big market for novelty kinda-bad cameras like Polaroids or Instax. The first Lytro has the perfect form factor for that and was already bulky enough that slapping a printer on it wouldn't have hurt.

Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were really exciting.

> unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't.

It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.

Phone cameras fake it.

They don't capture a light field like Lytro did, they capture a regular image with a very deep depth of field, extract a depth map (usually with machine learning, but some phones augment it with stereoscopy or even LIDAR on high end iPhones) and then selectively blur based on depth.

In fact, the Lytro Illum (the big one) had a really nice, very flexible, bright super-zoom lens. If you ever wondered how that was achieved: having the microlens array and a light field sensor (1) allows relaxing so many aberration constraints on the lens that you could have a light, compact super-zoom.

(1) it's not really different focal depths, it's actually more like multiple independent apertures at different spatial locations, each with a lower resolution sensor behind it - stereovision on steroids (stereoids?)

The problem with the Lytro was that the sensor/lens pair was just too darned small. If they had somehow scaled it up so that the sensor was about 4" in diameter, even if it meant using an interposing frosted glass plate or something to allow a smaller image sensor, the depth of field effects could have been fantastic. It would have allowed genuine and beautiful bokeh across almost any arbitrary focal plane, even pan/tilt, in software.

Their Cinema camera was so far ahead of it's time there still isn't anything that comes close to it's specs. It's like it's from another universe.