Ren Ng
Ren Ng
Yi-Ren Ngis the founder, executive chairman and former CEO of Lytro, a Mountain View, California-based startup company. Lytro is developing consumer light-field cameras based on Ng's graduate research at Stanford University...
NationalityMalaysian
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth21 September 1979
CountryMalaysia
change field forever light power takes
Light field photography unleashes the power of the light, to forever change how everyone takes and experiences pictures.
camera huge introduce needs product room technology time
Light-field photography is a transformational technology that needs a transformational product to introduce it. For the first time, we have a light-field camera that's going to be for everyone - not something in a huge room in a research facility.
action climbing difficult focus inherently personal pictures portrait rock sorts taking thinking time took
On the personal side, I was rock climbing and taking pictures with my friends. We took all sorts of portrait and action pictures, and I was thinking at the time that these are inherently difficult to focus correctly.
academic company due primarily reluctant start
I was reluctant to start the company that would become Lytro, primarily due to my academic background.
beyond biological experience goes human magical trying ways work
There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.
There's something about light field photography that's just magical.
hard
DSLRs take beautiful pictures, but they are hard to focus.
advance eventually interested led medical
I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.
opens possibilities
Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.
enters field information lens opportunity provides record regular software
If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact.
active capture fleeting frustrated loved picture trying using
I loved photography but was frustrated by the limitations of cameras. When trying to take a picture of a friend's young, active daughter using my DSLR, it was impossible to capture the fleeting moments.
candid children portraits time
It's very difficult to take candid portraits of children because they're moving around all the time.
art science
The merging of science and art is at the core of what we do.
array bunch effects entire frozen saw spin stanford took
The first light-field camera array I saw at Stanford had a bunch of applications, like to do special effects like you see in 'The Matrix,' where you spin the camera around in frozen motion. It took up an entire room.