We’ve covered Lytro here on ALC in the past; most recently we reviewed the Illum, their second generation light field camera designed for consumers. Lytro’s Living Pictures have been a creative boon to enthusiasts and professionals that have embraced the creative technique employed by this style of photography. Lytro has made a name for themselves pushing the limits of not only the cameras we use for capturing these Living Pictures but also how we edit and display them with the ease of use and range of creative control afforded by their system.
Once again, Lytro pushes to the forefront of photographic technology and industry disruption with their latest imaging advancement – the Lytro Immerge. The Lytro Immerge offers professional storytellers the world’s first professional light field solution for cinematic virtual reality (VR) capture and authoring. The Lytro Immerge delivers life-like VR with their “six Degrees of Freedom” image processing.
The Immerge is built from the ground up to seamlessly blend live-action and computer graphics and features configurable capture and playback options allowing VR storytellers to create truly immersive worlds that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
The Lytro Immerge is built around four primary components: a dense camera array, server, light field editor, and a video player. By building an entire system for this emerging new media, Lytro can deliver an end-to-end solution designed to free professional storytellers and filmmakers to build an immersive experience unlike any other.
Thanks to its globe-like design, the Lytro Immerge sets a new bar for cinematic VR Content. Its dense, configurable light field array of cameras allow for the capture of precise visual perspectives from any of the supported points of view. The Immerge also allows for seamless video capture without requiring stitching and delivers accurate horizontal and vertical parallax. Ultimately, the Lytro Immerge delivers the assets that are highly configurable to meet a wide range of production needs (including 360-degree and 180-degree environments, parallax, spherical, etc.). Pushing the envelope further, the Lytro Immerge adds depth information for each frame capture to produce a key layer that’s been missing in VR applications to date.
Lytro ImmergefromLytroonVimeo.
Upon playback, the Lytro Immerage truly shines. By using the Lytro Immerge’s light field volume date (depth information) a view can for the first time “walk” within any scene being displayed. This unprecedented advance in VR has the workings of creating a new way to not only make media but fundamentally change how we experience it.
To emphasize what this means, unlike current VR experiences where you are just a spectator within a 360-degree video, the Lytro Immerge promises VR pioneers the ability to create worlds that are not limited to a stationary point in space but rather fully open up the worlds that are captured. That hypothetical virtual walk in the woods doesn’t have to be limited to a theme park-esque ride on rails, instead the Lytro Immerge can open up the full expanse of the nature scene where the viewer is free to roam. That is the beauty of the 6 Degrees of Freedom that Lytro has developed.
“Everybody is talking about light fields and nobody fully understands the potential yet. Light field technology is probably going to be at the core of most narrative VR,” said Aaron Koblin, Co-founder and CTO of Vrse. “At Vrse, we’re just waiting for the moment when we have the tools. I think both the capture and playback of Light Fields will be the future of cinematic virtual reality.
The 6 Degrees of Freedom isn’t limited to just video and filmmaking. The Lytro Immerge’s feature set can be fully integrated with computer generated images as well adding levels of depth and realism I like anything we’ve seen this far.
The Lytro Immerge is a tool that will help shape and differentiate the VR industry in ways that were simply unimaginable up to this point; by building an end-to-end solution for creators, the Immerge looks to be fulfilling the promises of a truly immersive virtual reality experience.
We’re still at the very early stages of the virtual reality revolution and Lytro has knocked this one out of the park! The Lytro Immerge has a feature set that will pave the way for the cinematic virtual realty filmmakers of the future and make it easy to deliver content to viewers. The future of film and entertainment looks to be headed into highly developed virtual content, and the Lytro Immerge will help storytellers get there.
