Hi All, just got my Lume Pad in Oz and loving it! Just a suggestion for Leia Player:
Is it possible to disable (or remove in an update) the side swiping feature over the playing video area? It’s frustrating when I see a smudge or a crumb and try to wipe it with my finger, only to find that the current video I’m watching will suddenly go to the previous or next video (It’s very sensitive!). Wouldn’t it be easier to use the top left arrow to go back to the menu and then select another video to play, if that is what you want to do?
Can Leia Player please remember exactly where you were in a video you were watching, so it can resume from that exact point when you play it again later, instead of it starting from the very beggining again?
I second the request for both of those suggestions. They should be implemented ASAP. Side-swiping should definitely be disabled for videos. Oftentimes, I barely touch the screen to turn on/off the top and bottom banners in LeiaPlayer, and the video changes. And since LeiaPlayer re-starts each video from the beginning, it is extremely frustrating to use!!!
I have another suggestion for improving LeiaPlayer. I love my Lume Pad, but the product has been widely trashed in the online 3D photo forums, due to the poor resolution of the light-field. The horizontal resolution (landscape) in 2D mode is 2560, but this is reduced to 640 since a 4x4 array of physical pixels is used to form each light-field pixel. I fully understand this, and I understand that 4V allows a wider sweet-spot, and Leia has bet the company on it. (ST mode appears to use the same 4-view light-field pixel but simply shows the left image in the first 2 views, and the right image in the other two views, so ST mode has the same 640 resolution.)
I think you could easily kneecap your critics in the 3-D enthusiast community by implementing one more viewing mode (let’s call it “high-res stereo” or HS), where you reduce the light-field pixel size from 4x4 to 2x2, or even 2x1. This would allow the Lume Pad to match the 1280 horizontal resolution of the new lenticular tablets coming onto the market. (It would obviously reduce the sweet-spot for viewing, but the improvement in resolution would be well worth it.) Again, I understand that Leia doesn’t care about pleasing the small 3D enthusiast market (Nima has made that quite clear), but why write them off, when you could get their eager endorsement with a change like this? To avoid confusing other people, you can hide this new HS mode in the “Use Advanced Tools” setting, like you’ve done with the ST mode.
Lume Pad has a fixed resolution in 3D mode whether you display ST or 4V images, however displaying in ST does improve the perceived clarity and overall resolution of the image, of course with a very narrow view point. We understand the resolution limitation of this first generation device and this is something we are fixing for sure in future generations so stay tuned…
Thanks for answering, @dfattal. That is disappointing; I had thought you could make this change on the current hardware. Since you can control each of the 2560 pixels separately in 2D mode, I thought that perhaps you could configure the light-field differently, but you know the Lume Pad better than I do, obviously. (I still give you kudos for having a stereo camera, which the other tablets do not have.)
I did not say that we don’t care about pleasing 3D enthusiasts, and in fact, many features we’ve recently added like MPO support, SBS export, etc. are a direct response to requests from 3D enthusiasts.
All I’m trying to convey is that 3D enthusiasts are a dedicated but small market, but hopefully long-term, we’d love to bring 3D Lightfield to EVERYONE! So sometimes if it seems like we’re focusing on things that aren’t the #1 desire of 3D enthusiasts, understand we also want to make great products that are intuitive and easy to use for anyone, especially those new to 3D.
In addition, our strategy changes over time. Recently we’ve finally had an influx of many 3D enthusiasts purchasing Lume Pad, so obviously there are many more voices making these sorts of requests, which increases the chance we’ll make them happen!
Hopefully the utility of Lume Pad will continue to increase with some amazing upcoming features we have in the pipeline, which will make sure that Lume Pad is a useful tool for 3D enthusiasts to create 3D content even if they eventually want to display their content on a 3D TV or other SBS-compatible device.