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

358 points ofalkaed | 2 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.517s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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_bent ◴[12 Oct 25 14:17 UTC] No.45558404[source]▶
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.

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1. s3p ◴[12 Oct 25 14:29 UTC] No.45558472[source]▶
Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were really exciting.
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2. phire ◴[12 Oct 25 15:05 UTC] No.45558714[source]▶
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.