Silicon Valley startup Lytro offers immersive VR camera with higher definition

SAN FRANCISCO, California — A startup based in Silicon Valley has unveiled a new virtual reality (VR) camera that uses hundreds of tiny lenses and image sensors to provide life-like presence for live action.

Lytro, based in Mountain View of North California, said the new hardware, named Lytro Immerge, is the world’s first professional light field solution for cinematic VR with four times more definition than regular high resolution (HD) cameras.

“It is the perfect technology for VR and it will be a game-changer, because it allows the user to have an immersive experience, instead of the flat experience other VR cameras provide,” Ariel Braunstein, chief officer of product (COP) at Lytro, told Xinhua.

Light field technology was first developed by the company for regular photo cameras in 2006, as it was founded that year by Executive Chairman Ren Ng, whose doctoral research on light field imaging won Stanford University’s prize for best thesis in computer science.

It uses sensors to capture each individual ray of light in the image, its color and its focal point, allowing for 3D viewing.

Braunstein said other VR equipment on the market relies mainly on small HD cameras mounted on a sphere to provide a 360-degree all-around feeling. “It’s a flat feeling, and it makes people nauseated, because live action video doesn’t behave inside the gear like computer graphics, which give users the sense of motion.”

Light field mimics the real flow of light. And Lytro Immerge does this by attaching hundreds of tiny cameras to five circles on top of a tripod. Lytro claims that the whole experience of the new VR camera comes along with a production system that includes a server, uploading and streaming to the cloud, editing tools and an application, or app, to use VR headsets.

Plus, the camera is controlled via a smarthphone app, where users can view and adjust any settings remotely.

Given the recent popularity of VR headsets, Lytro Immerge aims to get ahead of the market and become the primary content creation tool for VR.

It comes with a hefty price tag, though Lytro expects that its demand will be in rental, once it is released in the first quarter of 2016. “It will probably cost a few thousand dollars an hour to rent it, but it comes with an end-to-end production system, not just the camera,” the company’s COP said.

Developers believe that their main clients will be Hollywood studios or VR production companies, not consumers.

source: interaksyon.com

First Pacific to set up shop in Silicon Valley: 'We need to tap into ecosystem of innovation' - MVP

First Pacific Managing Director Manuel V. Pangilinan on Monday evening (Tuesday morning in Manila) told an audience at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, that the conglomerate will set up an office in Silicon Valley to help spur a more competitive culture in an economic era defined by companies' ability to innovate.

Pangilinan said the office, likely to be set up in San Francisco, expresses how "crucial and necessary" it has become for their members to immerse in the ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and to network with companies, from start-ups to giants in the tech industry, all on the cutting edge of the new economy.

"The Philippines is so far behind in innovation," he said.

Pangilinan has gathered First Pacific's top executives in a summit in Palo Alto this week, lining up presentations and meetings with a broad range of Silicon Valley experts and institutions, leading to what they hope to be a bold move to make each part and whole more innovative and competitive.

Edward Tortorici, executive director of the Hong Kong-listed First Pacific, took part in a panel that followed Pangilinan's address to the Stanford students, and said, "our theme in these workshops is: 'Disrupt or be disrupted. Be the wolf or be the sheep.'"

Pangilinan shared that, "just on our first day here, we were told: What if Yahoo looks at the telco business? What if Google goes into energy?"

First Pacific's portfolio across Asia is bannered by dominant Philippine IT-telcos PLDT, Smart, and Sun, but it is also heavily invested in infrastructure (Metro Pacific), energy (Meralco), water (Maynilad), food and agriculture (Indofood and Roxas Holdings), and mining (Philex). It also owns or manages eight hospitals and has upped its play in mass media, controlling TV5, its online news portal InterAksyon.com, satellite-cable provider Cignal, and, most recently, the country's top business newspaper, BusinessWorld.

In all, Pangilinan said First Pacific's total value of listed assets rounds out to $38.6 billion.

Though the conglomerate's executives run companies that mostly dominate their respective sectors in the Philippines and/or Asia, all were candid in acknowledging room for change in its processes and culture.

Smart's Orlando Vea said: "Sixty percent of our workers are Generation Y. Only 3 percent of our management is Generation Y. Change must start with us."

Vea took his turn to address the Stanford audience with a litany of needs for a more innovative and adaptive group. "We need hardware and software engineers. We need help in big data, analytics, business intelligence," he said. "And we also need people who know and understand Design Thinking."

Tortorici said the office in San Francisco will initially serve "as a listening post", a representative desk that can help network with Silicon Valley individuals and groups while also capturing and relaying innovations – whether products or processes – to the larger operations in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Pangilinan said the office may be up as early as April. They have scouted space right at the building of the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco he said. The unit will likely be set up, and initially led, by Earl Valencia, president of the IdeaSpace Foundation also set up by the MVP group.

IdeaSpace was seeded and operates in the Philippines, with a base embedded with First Pacific and Metro Pacific headquarters in Makati. It runs "innovation labs" and competitions annually, functioning as the group's "incubator and accelerator" where potential startups can pitch, and promising ideas can be leveraged off the network and operations of all member companies.

But having such an operation in Manila is not enough, Pangilinan said they are quickly realizing. "We need to be tapped into Silicon Valley. From (venture capitalists) to incubators to the biggest players, this has a complete ecosystem that we do not have in the Philippines."

Pangilinan said he envisions a "mix" of workers and talent to be recruited from the Philippines, and Silicon Valley itself, and then a two-way exchange of ideas between San Francisco and Asia.

First Pacific will remain focused on Southeast Asia, its leaders said, but even in its region and home turf, it will need to directly imbibe whatever it can of the culture of the Valley.

source: interaksyon.com