How Nokia is reinventing itself with a $60,000 virtual reality camer

Last July Nokia revealed Ozo, a high-end virtual reality camera designed to capture video and audio in full, 360-degree glory. It’s the kind of integrated solution that the VR market has been largely lacking; while artists are regularly creating live-action VR content, most of it is coming from custom rigs or cobbled-together solutions. Nothing has stood out as the kind of premium gear that is regularly used to shoot film and television.

Tonight at an event in downtown Los Angeles, Nokia revealed just how much that kind of integrated, professional solution will cost, and it’s not cheap: Ozo is priced at $60,000, putting it well out of reach for the hobbyist. But for Nokia, which is faced with reinventing itself after undergoing cataclysmic upheaval in the past few years, it’s the opportunity to take a leadership position in a nascent industry, much like it did with phones decades ago.

"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 tells me. After looking through the the experiments the Nokia team had been working on, it was an early prototype of Ozo — first started in 2013 — that caught his eye. "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’ instincts on timing can’t be understated. Ozo will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2016, just as consumers will find themselves with an overabundance of VR viewing options — from simple solutions like Google Cardboard and Gear VR, all the way up to the imminent Playstation VR and Oculus Rift. It’s undoubtedly going to result in a massive uptick in content creation, and Nokia is happy to support every platform or device out there. "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." It’s a unique take — executives cite camera companies like Arri and RED as points of comparison — carving out a niche that nobody has really bothered to lay claim to yet.

In that regard, the key feature that sets Ozo apart for filmmakers is the inclusion of live monitoring. On film and TV sets, that’s a baseline requirement: directors and cinematographers can see what they’re capturing on a monitor while on set. But for VR, it’s another matter: the computing power needed to stitch imagery together has traditionally meant VR creators have to wait long after they finish shooting to see what they actually captured. Ozo sidesteps that with what Nokia calls "dynamic rendering", allowing 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.