The new Lytro camera for real estate
The good folks at Inman wrote an article displaying some Lytro photos for a real estate listing, viewable here: http://next.inman.com/2012/03/lytro-a-new-kind-of-photograph/. You can view Lytro photos at that link or at Lytro’s Picture Gallery to see Lytro’s primary feature (image focusing post-image-capture) it in action.
Here’s a quickie roundup on the Lytro camera in terms of real estate imaging:
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Lytro is a new “light field” camera, which is the technology that allows the image to be focused and re-focused after the image data is captured.
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The images are not high-resolution, so they wouldn’t be suitable for a full-screen image viewer.
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The Lytro viewer (that allows images to be clicked on to be refocused) is sourced from Lytro’s website. It’s “online software” that knows how to read the image data from the Lytro image file. This means you can’t post the image to places like the MLS, your Broker site, Zillow, Trulia, etc. and expect the images to have that Lytro functionality. In other words, unless using the Lytro viewer embedded in the webpage (like Inman’s link or Lytro’s picture gallery link above), the images are not able to be refocused “on the fly”.
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The “stick of butter”-shaped camera doesn’t have a wide-angle lens, so it’s not ideally-suited for real estate interiors.
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The Lytro online software that allows Lytro images to be refocused runs on Adobe Flash, which isn’t natively compatible with iPads, iPhones, iDevices. So it’s not perfect for presenting real estate listings.
At this time, the Lytro camera is really a toy or hobby camera, not the “latest greatest revolutionary” camera for real estate marketing. But feel free to buy one and play with it anyways. It is neat technology, and it will improve in various ways as demand and use cases increase.