Digital camera company Lytro is making buzz in the tech world this week, having announced partnerships with NASA, the Defense Department, and a number of companies in the energy and healthcare industries.
The company wants to share its cameras' light-field — "shoot first, focus later" — capabilities with third parties, licensing out its cutting edge technology to be incorporated into unique endeavors, like exploring space or spying on enemies. In other words: they provide the software, you provide the hardware.
"We have a strong flood of inbound interest of people who want to leverage Light-field photography for their applications, and our response has been 'that's interesting, but we're inventing the future of photography and that's taking up 100 percent of our time,'" Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal told the Verge.
Now, that's changed, as the company looks to shake up the way camera companies do business.
The company is now selling what it calls Lytro Developer Kits (LDK) to anyone willing to fork over a $20,000 annual subscription fee. Included in each kit is the software, the application programming interface or API. Developers will gain access to innards of Lytro's technology, allowing them to rewrite applications and build custom codes that put the power of Lytro's image processing algorithms toward unique ends — documenting asteroids, monitoring newborns, or supercharging night vision googles.
"In the normal course of our business, we would just never get to build new products like that," Rosenthal told Wired. "But through the LDK, we're able to open up the platform and technology in this way, so all these customers can really go after esoteric applications and spread the adoption and capabilities of the product."
