Nokia’s Ozo VR camera costs $60,000 and will ship early next year

At its event in Los Angeles on Monday, Nokia announced that its Ozo VR camera now has a price tag: $60,000. The company is now accepting pre-orders and will begin shipping them in the first quarter of 2016.

First shown off in July, the camera is capable of shooting and broadcasting live footage in 3D and 360 degrees. It features eight image sensors and an equal number of microphones, and negates the need for stitching footage together. That enables directors to preview cuts in real-time, without having to wait for them to be processed.

At that price, the Ozo will be out of reach for most people, but it will likely draw the attention of film studios, documentarians and educators. But Nokia has plans to make VR more accessible to potential users.

Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies, told The Verge:

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. 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.

This is going to be the top of the pyramid in terms of quality. There’s going to be something where you might not need every single bell and whistle. Something you can just take as it is, stick it somewhere, press record, and it goes. And that’s something that we are thinking about.

It’ll be interesting to see if Nokia can lead the charge for VR content creation tools in the face of competition from companies like Giroptic and Jaunt. It has a serious advantage over its rivals with its real-time previewing capabilities, but it’s not clear if that will be enough to help it become the world standard for 360-degree cameras.

➤ Ozo [Nokia via The Verge]