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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: 0s | 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. bobmcnamara ◴[12 Oct 25 14:48 UTC] No.45558601[source]▶
> 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.

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2. summa_tech ◴[12 Oct 25 16:36 UTC] No.45559527[source]▶
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?)