Steve Jobs Wanted Lytro's Plenoptic Camera for next iPhone
Lytro’s plenoptic camera technology might find a new home in smartphones, if the company has anything to do with it. The technology, which lets you focus a picture after the shot has already been taken (thanks to some genius optics and clever software) was at least considered by Steve Jobs for the next iPhone, and now the company has announced that it is open to licensing it.
Then head-honcho Steve apparently met several times with the company’s CEO Ren Ng, according to a new nonfiction book, “Inside Apple.”
The company's CEO, Ren Ng, a brilliant computer scientist with a PhD from Stanford, immediately called Jobs, who picked up the phone and quickly said, 'if you’re free this afternoon maybe we would could get together.' Ng, who is 32, hurried to Palo Alto, showed Jobs a demo of Lytro's technology, discussed cameras and product design with him, and, at Jobs's request, agreed to send him an email outlining three things he'd like Lytro to do with Apple.
Now, during a Q&A session with PC World, the company mentioned maybe getting into the mobile phone industry through a partnership:
If we were to apply the technology in smartphones, that ecosystem is, of course, very complex, with some very large players there. It's an industry that's very different and driven based on operational excellence. For us to compete in there, we'd have to be a very different kind of company. So if we were to enter that space, it would definitely be through a partnership and a codevelopment of the technology, and ultimately some kind of licensing with the appropriate partner.There are, of course, some challenges. Thanks to the design of the optics that make plenoptic light-field cameras possible, the image capture devices are huge and 3D, whereas a traditional CMOS can be pretty much flat. If the tech was to be stuck into a smartphone, which prioritize thinness over almost everything else, it needs to be significantly shrunk.
That said, the first company to integrate this into a phone is going to have a major selling point. The ability to adjust the focus of a picture after the fact pretty much destroys the existance of blurriness, and is also one heck of a tech demo.
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