Lytro Wants to Transform Its Futuristic Cameras Into Night Vision Goggles

Lytro is a company that easily captures the imagination. Leveraging something called light field technology, it offers a kind of futuristic camera that lets you refocus pictures after you’ve already taken them.

But for all the hype surrounding these cameras, they’ve never really taken off. That’s because, for most consumers, camera technology doesn’t matter as much as it once did. Smartphones have eaten into the territory once dominated by point-and-shoot cameras, and professional-level DSLRs rarely excite anyone other than, well, professionals.

That’s why Lytro is rolling out something new. It’s not a camera. It’s a hardware developer kit—a technology that would allow outside companies to harness its light field technology in new ways. The idea is that developers could create a special camera that can analyze soil samples—or a thermal sensor that can recognize your particular heat signature, a new way of verifying identity.

Known as the Lytro Development Kit, , it includes an application programming interface, or API, that lets developers write applications and custom code that utilize Lytro’s image processing algorithms and other tools. But Lytro says it will also work with its customers to design custom hardware, providing options to switch out a device’s lenses and sensors, depending on the company’s intended application.

In addition to unveiling its developer kit technology, Lytro also announced partnerships with four organizations that are already creating products using the platform. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing new cameras that can look into deep space and cameras that may be mounted on future rovers. General Sensing, a medical devices startup, is looking into using the tech for baby and child monitoring. The Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate is considering supercharged Lytro night vision goggles. And there’s one more “major industrial partner” Lytro won’t name yet that is using their LDK for work with nuclear reactors.

“In the normal course of our business, we would just never get to build new products like that,” Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Lytro, tells 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.”