While Nokia had unveiled Ozo, its high-end virtual reality camera designed to capture video and audio in full, 360-degree glory, the company announced the price of the futuristic device at $60,000.
While artists are regularly creating live-action VR content, Ozo is the kind of integrated solution that the VR market has been largely lacking. Nothing has stood out as the kind of premium gear that is regularly used to shoot film and television.
However with a price tag of $60,000 the Ozo would be well out of reach for the hobbyist.
However for Nokia this is the opportunity to take a leadership position in a nascent industry, much like it did with phones decades ago, as the company strives to reinvent itself after undergoing cataclysmic upheaval in the past few years.
"When I joined in September of 2014, I was tasked with coming up with a new strategy for Nokia Technologies," Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies says.
The Ozo caught the eye of Haidamus, work and experiments on which had been started in 2003.
"It was a very early prototype; a lab rat. But the video 3D accuracy, and the audio accuracy were phenomenal, even at that stage. And I knew we had a winner, because if you were to think of the market that’s being disrupted, introducing a brand new medium, we were catching it at the right time," Haidamus recalls.
The first shipments of Ozo would be made in the first quarter of 2016. From simple solutions like Google Cardboard and Gear VR, all the way up to the imminent Playstation VR and Oculus Rift, the timing of Ozo would coincide with the easy availability of a host of VR viewing options.
Nokia expects that there would be a massive uptick in content creation.
"There are parts of this market that we’d like to own," Haidamus says. "The content creation piece, and format, of course. And then we’re going to partner everywhere else," he adds.
With respect to content creation and Nokia’s planned capture of the empty market space, the key feature that sets Ozo apart for filmmakers is the inclusion of live monitoring. This is one of the primary requirements on film and TV sets where the directors and cinematographers see what they’re capturing on a monitor while on set.
However in the case of virtual reality, VR creators have to wait long after they finish shooting to see what they actually captured as large computing power is needed to stitch imagery together.
However Ozo would allow filmmakers to don VR goggles and look around the 360-degree field of view captured by Ozo’s eight lenses and microphones in real time through a technology that Nokia calls "dynamic rendering".
"We’re going to make Ozo available for rent at rental houses, to make it accessible, and of course we need to start thinking about how can we make it more accessible to prosumers," Haidamus says.
"A prosumer [version] would have to be a fraction of this cost, and that has to be something we start thinking about immediately from a product line perspective,” he adds.
(Source:www.theverge.com & www.independent.ie)
While artists are regularly creating live-action VR content, Ozo is the kind of integrated solution that the VR market has been largely lacking. Nothing has stood out as the kind of premium gear that is regularly used to shoot film and television.
However with a price tag of $60,000 the Ozo would be well out of reach for the hobbyist.
However for Nokia this is the opportunity to take a leadership position in a nascent industry, much like it did with phones decades ago, as the company strives to reinvent itself after undergoing cataclysmic upheaval in the past few years.
"When I joined in September of 2014, I was tasked with coming up with a new strategy for Nokia Technologies," Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies says.
The Ozo caught the eye of Haidamus, work and experiments on which had been started in 2003.
"It was a very early prototype; a lab rat. But the video 3D accuracy, and the audio accuracy were phenomenal, even at that stage. And I knew we had a winner, because if you were to think of the market that’s being disrupted, introducing a brand new medium, we were catching it at the right time," Haidamus recalls.
The first shipments of Ozo would be made in the first quarter of 2016. From simple solutions like Google Cardboard and Gear VR, all the way up to the imminent Playstation VR and Oculus Rift, the timing of Ozo would coincide with the easy availability of a host of VR viewing options.
Nokia expects that there would be a massive uptick in content creation.
"There are parts of this market that we’d like to own," Haidamus says. "The content creation piece, and format, of course. And then we’re going to partner everywhere else," he adds.
With respect to content creation and Nokia’s planned capture of the empty market space, the key feature that sets Ozo apart for filmmakers is the inclusion of live monitoring. This is one of the primary requirements on film and TV sets where the directors and cinematographers see what they’re capturing on a monitor while on set.
However in the case of virtual reality, VR creators have to wait long after they finish shooting to see what they actually captured as large computing power is needed to stitch imagery together.
However Ozo would allow filmmakers to don VR goggles and look around the 360-degree field of view captured by Ozo’s eight lenses and microphones in real time through a technology that Nokia calls "dynamic rendering".
"We’re going to make Ozo available for rent at rental houses, to make it accessible, and of course we need to start thinking about how can we make it more accessible to prosumers," Haidamus says.
"A prosumer [version] would have to be a fraction of this cost, and that has to be something we start thinking about immediately from a product line perspective,” he adds.
(Source:www.theverge.com & www.independent.ie)