The company first caught people’s attention three years ago with its light field technology where the camera would capture everything in range, so people can do things like select a focus after taking the picture. The company is pitching the Immerge as the world’s first professional light field camera capable of producing cinematic-quality virtual reality.
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While Lytro’s Illum camera captures light field data from one direction for “still” photos, the new ball-shaped Immerge camera captures Light Field Volume, or light field data from every single direction at once.
Lytro, a privately held startup, last raised funding in February with a $50 million round of investment led by Woodside, Calif., firm GSV Capital. The company calls the feature “Cinematic VR”. By capturing all the rays of light in a 360 field of view, the Lytro Immerge wants to evolve how virtual reality footage is captured.
Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Lytro, said about the camera system, “Traditional cinematic production and virtual reality are quickly becoming two sides of the same coin”. It built its “light field” solution from the ground up.
The Immerge, however, is different. Lytro’s light field is, genuinely, an entire environment recorded, with data accounting for exactly where each object is within a scene. And then by stacking five on top of one another, we’re giving you a capture of the full light-field volume. “It would be something like this”, explained Rosenthal.
The rig, which shoots using “multiple hundreds” of cameras and sensors, comes with its own portable server to process and store the footage. As you’d expect, this setup won’t be accessible to the average consumer, mostly due to its professional price tag.
“Imagine you have this spherical surface right, and every ray of light coming from the outside world is captured and recorded”. It also enables six degrees of freedom, so the viewer can look all around them to see the entire scene.
This system is created to be compatible with all types of existing VR playback systems including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Sony PlayStation VR et al, which should promote its adoption. But when you think about who will pick these cameras up, they can probably afford it and have budgeted for emerging tech like this. Instead, it has announced that it is building what is likely the world’s most expensive, and most sophisticated, end-to-end VR video capture, storage, and processing system. It will also be making trained camera operators available as part of the rental package. He wouldn’t comment on how much it’ll actually cost just yet.
Illum’s launch paved the path for Lytro’s transformation into a virtual-reality company.
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But what are we going to watch on them? Being able to move around a movie scene is not just potentially nausea diminishing, it’s a way to feel like you’re in the scene set with the actors, that old 3D movie advertising trope made reality. Felix & Paul, Vrse and WEVR will get early access to this technology to create new films with light-field technology. “Our focus has always been how do we make that happen, and how do we build a platform around it”.
