44 FEATURE HOLOGRPAHIC CAPTURE
Stereoscopic 3D was always a small step towards true holography, we look at some old/newways to gets us even closer
WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL
Of course it was too good to be true and realists laughed at the sheer size of the camera, its data load and also at the rental prices that came after. For Lytro it was a way of cementing its technology with a flagship product. The company soon also produced a smaller (but still pretty big) 360 camera, Immerge with 95 light-field cameras, which were offset to produce a wider field of view. The Immerge looked promising and version 2.0 increased the possibilities. Unfortunately, Lytro’s story ended earlier this year when it was bought by Google to possibly add its assets to the search giant’s own efforts in holographic capture. MERIDIAN Just as we saw the demise of Lytro, master riggers Radiant Images joined with Sony and immersion specialists Visby to produce Meridian, a new light-field capture tool.
t the NAB Convention in 2016 Lytro demonstrated its new cinema product. Lytro had previously only been known
for its cute consumer cameras that used light-field technology, a way of capturing light intensity but more crucially light rays and the way they travel in space to produce a z-axis depth. This allowed for such things as the ability to refocus after shooting the frame. They didn’t really sell. The Lytro Cinema camera took that premise and multiplied it hugely with a Raw 755-megapixel per frame 400Gb/s data stream shooting at 300 frames-per-second. This massive volumetric capture promised the end of green screens as with such a large volume you could bend every pixel to your whim. Changing focus and depth-of-field was just the start. It was the depth and so positioning of the real world that would allow it to be post-produced and changed in any way you wanted.
Meridian is basically a three- by four-foot panel with 24 Sony RX0 cameras carefully positioned throughout the panel. And it’s at “the forefront of the next cycle of immersive capture technology, taking viewers beyond VR by enabling more freedom of movement within the story,” according to Michael Mansouri of Radiant Images. He continues: “We created the Meridian from a collaboration with Sony, who had approached the company
ABOVE OTOY’s 2015 light field ‘office’ experiment with rotating DSLRs.
DEFINITION AUGUST 2018
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