Great. You got half of what I was saying.

There’s a bigger lesson here, and it’s not about “wait and see” — it’s about engineers and their hubris. There’s something here, and it likely has very little to do with 4D light fields but about introducing new rituals of image making. Brownie moment this is not, although they play it up as if they’ve done something like that. They invented an enabler and sold it as a camera.

*shrug.

I’d guess without a solid footing in the world of people and their ways of recollecting, this’ll blow over soon enough.

The problem is that Lytro doesn’t just break the physical and visual rituals of photography. it commits the design sin of confusing forced simplicity with thoughtful minimalism. The Lytro’s simplicity is great. But, why is it square and not round? Why slide to zoom vs. a zoom knob or in/out buttons? Why a small, arm’s-length screen and not an up-to-the-eye viewfinder? Their choices may have been bold but seem somehow arbitrary.

As for the central idea/gimmick: I’m all for it. I’d love to be able to change the focus, lighting, even angle of a photograph after the fact and I don’t doubt those tricks and more will be available someday. Just give me a form-factor and controls that help me capture the best possible “4D data cloud” in the heat of the moment.

Well, yes. Of course. I appreciate the point of view, especially as a technology guy. As a design+technology guy as well — I wonder how you explain that to the normal humans they’re trying to sell this thing to. I mean — if it was a bit of laboratory apparatus for specialist and technicians, they’re pitch would work so much better. “Tell my mum — hey, it’s 4D Light Field. It’s fundamental. So, like..buy it.”

*shrug

But, the point I’m trying to make — and Lytro is suffering my beating it with my own shoe — is that you can take something like this — a fab engineering-led idea that has a whiff of changing things — and completely drop the ball by mucking up the industrial design, UX, IxD..pretty much everything except some arcane aspect of imaging science. I mean — it “works” but only technically. I’d never hold something to capture an image the way Lytro is making me — I’d argue that its an uncomfortable posture unless it was up to my eyeball. Etc. Etc.

I agree that this is fascinating. Being an overly-enthusiastic amateur photographer with a couple of Pelican cases of kit, three photo book projects in various stages of development &c., I can find value in the evolution of image making. Heck, I studied photography and its history while working on my masters in engineering — which was focused, parenthetically, on another supposedly ground-breaking imaging technology called Virtual Reality.

So, people like the Lytro tech-nerds need to do their fundamental concept making, I totally agree. Every engineer who gets access to a 3D printer and can flub their way through SolidWorks or even Rhino thinks they’re an Industrial Designer cause they can extrude a rectangle and shove all their electronics guts in there. I know. I used to do that and think I had an end-to-end idea->product chain consisting of just me.

There’s more work to be done here though — work that means that engineering cannot lead the charge over the “productization” hill. It can be in the charge, but really — it needs to do a painful bit of collaboration with others who can *help avoid calling a doorknob a house.

Thanks for that link, btw! Your blog is fantastic.

That said, I agree with some of your criticism of the Lytro “esthetic”, see:
http://terragalleria.com/blog/2011/06/28/light-field-camera-from-lytro/