We fell in love with the Lytro camera over five years ago and experimented with its insane post focus abilities before the company shifted from building consumer cameras to professional cameras. When we saw the new Lytro Immerge 2.0, a 95-lens virtual reality (VR) camera that will bring quality experiences unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Before we go down the path of what this new Lytro camera can do, we have to say, please build a waterproof housing for this ASAP so we can get some stunning and truly immersive reef VR soon!
Now back to the Lytro. While VR is still emerging, Lytro has raised the bar on what a VR camera can do. The first Immerge camera was the fist one to hit the VR holy grail of capturing “Six Degrees of Freedom” where you can move forward, backward, up, down, left and right within that video. This is much different than a 360-degree video you can watch from one fixed position.
The new Immerge still uses 95 light field cameras mounted to a hexagonal body that were on the first one, but that now they can move 120 degrees (up from 90 in the first version). What this does is allow for the camera to spin just three times to capture the same amount of data that was captured in five — allowing it to capture better data, faster.
Lytro also improved the software that is already able to capture higher quality video — with up to 10K resolution per eye as soon as VR headsets gain more resolving power. This system just looks impressive and while we appreciate what it can potentially do on terra firma, we are really hoping to see this technology taken beneath the waves.
