Virtual Reality isn't just for gamers — 360-degree VR videos are being used for documentaries, sports and concerts. They've been featured in both Google and Facebook's recent developer conferences and could head to the cinema next.
California-based startup Jaunt's new camera, codenamed "NEO," is the first professional-grade camera for filming virtual reality movies. It's already Jaunt's fifth generation of VR camera, but the two-year-old company says this is the first one capable of capturing "fully immersive, 360-degree cinematic VR experiences."
The NEO is a sleek-looking wheel featuring a series of adjacent high-definition cameras that film in 360 degrees — putting the viewer "inside" the video. Previous VR camera setups have come off a little cobbled-together, but this looks more like a professional product. The systems have a range of features to produce cinematic-quality footage, including custom optics specifically designed for 3D light-field capture, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging and large-format sensors with superior low-light performance.
The camera system isn't actually going on sale — rather, the first NEOs will be leased to Jaunt's partners in August. Jaunt also promises to use the new camera to increase production of VR videos from Jaunt Studios, which was launched in May.
"With NEO, we have overcome many of the technical hurdles of producing high-quality cinematic VR experiences," said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder and CTO of Jaunt. "Its image quality and ease-of-use will allow creatives to focus on producing awesome content without the complexity of cameras built from off-the-shelf components not designed for VR."
Plenty of other companies are building VR cameras, such as Samsung's Project Beyond and the Kickstarter funded-Giroptic 360. At Facebook's F8 developer conference in March, Mark Zuckerberg showcased a VR video that showed live coverage of Facebook's campus, captured by a set of GoPros in a ball array to film spherical video. In May, Google unveiled Jump — a VR content creation tool that includes a circular camera rig featuring 16 GoPro cameras and software to create the video.
Just last week, Google announced that Jaunt will also be getting early access to the Jump platform. Jaunt will, however, use its own cameras, which are made to far higher specs than GoPro cameras.
"Every aspect of the NEO design, from the high-speed image sensor, to the wide-angle optics, to the embedded software, was engineered with cinematic VR capture in mind," said Koji Gardiner, director of hardware engineering at Jaunt and the lead behind the new camera design.
In spite of this, CTO van Hoff says Jaunt is not a camera company, but more of a full-service VR video company providing everything from hardware to software and a creative studio.
"We actually don't mind working with other professional-quality VR cameras if they were to exist, because we're not really a camera company," said van Hoff. "We just built this camera because we needed it."
Still, at the moment, Jaunt appears to be more of a VR camera company than anyone else — and it certainly has the leading product on the market. VR cameras are already being used by journalists and filmmakers at PBS's Frontline and the Des Moines Register to create powerful and interactive documentaries. The industry is still trying to figure out how to film in this new format, but with technology like the NEO available, it surely won't be long before we see the first VR feature-length movie.
