[11] In the fall of 2015, Lytro changed direction, announcing Immerge, a very-high-end VR video capture camera with companion custom compute server.

[13][14] While he was a researcher at Stanford, Ren Ng was photographing a friend's daughter and noticed, "it was incredibly difficult to focus the image properly and capture her fleeting smile in just the right way".

[15] After completing his Ph.D, Ng decided to use his experience in light field research to "start a company that would produce light-field cameras that everyone could enjoy.

In June 2011, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs purportedly met with Ng to discuss improvements for the iPhone camera.

[20] In November, 2018, the original Lytro website lytro.com was redirecting to Raytrix, a German manufacturer of scientific light field cameras.

The original camera is a square tube less than five inches long with a lens opening at one end and a 1.52-inch (38.6 mm) LCD touch screen at the other.

[26][27][28] On November 5, 2015, Lytro announced Immerge, an end-to-end system for capturing light fields for use in creating virtual reality (VR) content.

Some of the impact of the true innovations in the capture portion of the devices were not used to their full potential due to the lack of support for 3D displays.