Former mobile maker Nokia, which flogged off its mobile business to Microsoft in 2014 – along with its CEO Stephen Elop, this week onsold to Telstra – is making a hardware comeback, unveiling a $60,000 virtual-reality camera.
he camera is the brainchild of exec Ramzi Haidamus, who joined Nokia from Dolby Laboratories in July 2014, just after it got out of the mobile business.
Haidamus said Nokia asked him to figure out what to do with its consumer-hardware division – and a year and a half later the Nokia Ozo, a sleek, gray, rockmelon-size sphere with eight lenses inside, was born.
To currently film virtual-reality video, a filmmaker typically has to put several GoPro cameras on a rig, while pointing the lenses in different directions. Nokia says the Ozo is the first high-end VR camera ready to go out of the box, with all cameras and microphones contained within one device.
Haidamus told reporters that at US$60,000, the Ozo was meant to be sold or rented to professional filmmakers, though he added that Nokia plans to later introduce cheaper versions for hobbyists.
