Lytro Partners With 500px, Opens File Format Letting its Pictures Live More Places
One of the big challenges for light-field photography startup Lytro has been dealing with the fact that it has to fit into a world that understands photos and video, but isn't well suited or even interested …
Context & Ripple Effects
Since its 2012 launch, Lytro's refocusable photos have been trapped in its own viewer and its own software — a constraint the company itself kept tripping over, from the long wait for Windows desktop software to the Perspective Shift and Living Filters updates that only worked inside Lytro's ecosystem. Opening the file format is an admission that the walled garden was limiting where light-field images could go at all.
The timing matters: it follows the April 2014 launch of the $1,599 Illum aimed at professional photographers, a camera whose output is only useful if someone besides Lytro can display it. The 500px partnership gives that pro audience a first external venue, and pickup across Fortune, VentureBeat, Mashable, and Softpedia shows the story traveled well beyond gadget press.
First-order effects
- 500px becomes the first major third-party platform able to host interactive light-field images, giving Illum buyers a real distribution channel instead of Lytro-only sharing.
Second-order effects
- Other photo-sharing and publishing platforms now face a choice between supporting Lytro's format or ceding novel interactive content to whoever adopts it first — and Lytro's pro push raises the stakes, since working photographers will favor whichever outlet actually renders their files.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, computational-capture companies shift from selling closed gadgets to licensing formats and ecosystems — a structural bet that a capture innovation only survives once the rest of the web can display it.
The trend: Computational-photography startups are opening proprietary formats and courting third-party platforms as they graduate from consumer curiosities to professional tools.