Lytro Light Field Camera Dismantled by FCC

The Lytro Light Field Camera is, one might say, the closest thing to a unique device on today's market of photo and video capture products, especially given the FCC's recent findings.

The Lytro Light Field camera has passed through the hands of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Indeed, even though the product was never said to possess any sort of wireless connectivity, just this recent filing shows that it does.

In fact, the camera boasts an SoC (system-on-chip), called Marvell Avastar 88 W8787, which provides both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi links, though it is unclear if both will be enabled.

It is feasible that Lytro will sell Wi-Fi-only / Bluetooth-only models, as well as versions with no wireless support at all.

On that note, perhaps it will be possible to establish communication between it and smartphones and tablets, not just PCs.

At any rate, it is unclear what Lytro's plans are for this tube-like contraption.

For those that aren't quite up to date on what the Light Field camera is, the product captures the entire light field.

To elaborate, it “captures the entire light field, which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space.”

Additionally, there is 8x optical zoom and f/2 lens with a constant aperture across the entire zoom range (this led to the long, tube-like shape).

Sure, the images end up taking up 16MB of storage space each, but the bright side is that anyone will be able to re-focus and re-zoom them. The resolution is 11 Megarays (the number of light rays captured by the light field sensor).

The only real downside to the Lytro Light Field Camera is that the photos shot with it cannot be read by anything except a special application.

Thus, if Lytro ever looks at phone support, it will need to provide a version of this application that works on them.

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