Lytro Immerge: This Weird Ball Could Be the Key to Recording Real Life for Virtual Reality

Lytro's new Immerge could be the best virtual reality camera yet because it lets you move around.

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You may have heard of Lytro. A few years ago, the company developed an amazing and strange little rectangular camera with a bizarre and unique superpower: it could refocus pictures after you took them. But while the trick was amazing, the cameras that had it were expensive and somewhat limited. They never really lived up to their potential and took over the world.

But now, the Lytro is back with a completely new devices that's weird and cool and ambitious in all the same ways. Its called the Immerge, and it leverages that same technology to a completely different end. The Immerge wants to be virtual reality's best camera by recording footage that you can actually move around inside of.


There are already all kinds of cameras out there that aim to shoot footage not for flat screens, but for VR goggles. Simple 360-degree cameras can record a full sphere, but the video they capture is still flat. So when you watch this footage in VR, it's not like actually being there; it's instead like being trapped at the very center of a bubble that's made out of TV screens. This is what a lot of recorded "VR experiences" are right now. They're pretty terrible.

The real joy of virtual reality comes when you can really see in 3D. There are camera rigs that can do this. GoPro's crazy 16-camera VR rig uses off-set cameras to mimic the same stereo vision your eyes have so you can see the footage in 3D. Other systems accomplish the same thing by spinning cameras around wildly. But this approach is only marginally better than a 360-degree camera. It puts you inside a bubble made out of 3D-TV screens.

Lytro's Immerge camera claims to offer something better. By using the company's light-field tech, the ball-on-a-tripod captures a massive amount of data about the way light is hitting things in the room it's recording, instead of just taking pictures of what it can see. Then, with a ton of processing (the Immerge actually comes with a server) you can build that out into a VR world you can actually sort of move around in.

As Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal put it to Wired:

"Imagine a camera staying stationary, but being able to move your head around and getting further and closer away from an object in a scene. Having the reflection and the light rays adjusting accordingly. What the light field volume represents is, we're densely capturing all the rays in a given geometric volume, and then we've built software that lets us play back those rays at very high frame rates and at high resolution. It gives you the perfect recreation of the actual world you're capturing."

This is crucially important for good virtual reality. The ability to lean in and interact with the virtual scenery around you goes a long, long way towards making a fake cyberspace feel impossibly real.

There are some caveats. Not every virtual reality headset is capable of capturing that sort of movement information from the person who is wearing it, most notably Gear VR. And don't think that you can just pick up (or even rent) an Immerge to film your next family reuinion. This is a peice of professional equpiment and will probably cost thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars to rent.

Still, if it works as advertised, this could be a huge step forward in recording the real world and translating it into compelling VR. So maybe the next time someone tries an absurd VR publicity stunt, it might actually be worth trying to watch.

Source: Lytro via Engadget, Wired

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