Nokia OZO

» see ozo.nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I have never had my hands on one, and neither has almost anyone who reads this. The OZO shipped at sixty thousand dollars to production houses, so the honest distance here is not geographic. It is a price tag. What I do recognize is the problem it was built to solve, because stitching overlapping camera views into one consistent image is the same problem I work on now with cameras bolted to aircraft, and it is harder than it sounds in every direction.

Nokia announced the OZO in july 2015 and shipped it on 30 november. By then Nokia had already sold the phone business to Microsoft, and Nokia Technologies was the part left over, holding the patents and the research and looking for a new consumer product. The OZO was that attempt. An aluminum sphere the size of a human head, eight synchronized global-shutter sensors at 195 degrees each so their fields overlapped, eight microphones for spatial audio, 30 frames a second, stereoscopic so each eye got its own view.

Stereoscopic is the part that mattered and the part that made it expensive. Plenty of rigs could give you a 360 degree panorama. Very few could give you 360 degrees with depth in every direction, which is what a headset needs before a scene feels like a place rather than a wallpaper. Nokia built the thing that did it in one box, with live monitoring, so a director could look at the stitched result on set instead of finding out in post.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the machine ~

The pitch was to people already making films. Disney started shooting with the OZO in april 2016 and used it for promotional work around its own releases. It went out to broadcasters and to the VR studios that were being funded in that window on the assumption that headsets were about to be everywhere.

Nokia was not wrong about the engineering. The OZO was widely treated as the best professional capture rig available, and the OZO Audio work behind it, the spatial recording and the wind handling, was genuinely good. The bet it got wrong was about who would watch the footage.

~ what really happened ~

The price is the clearest record of what happened. It launched at $60,000, dropped to $40,000, and was being offered at $25,000 before the end. That is not a pricing strategy. That is a product looking for buyers who are not there.

On 10 october 2017 Nokia announced a restructuring of Nokia Technologies. Production of the OZO ended, the plan to build the next one was dropped, and up to 310 of the division's 1,090 employees went, in Finland and at the American and British offices. The stated reason was that the virtual reality market was developing more slowly than expected, and that the unit would concentrate on digital health and on licensing its technology instead. Existing customers were promised continued support, which for a sixty thousand dollar camera is the minimum you can say.

It was a bad autumn for the category generally. The professional VR film business that the OZO was built to equip turned out to be a couple of hundred productions rather than an industry, and the companies making content for it were folding in the same stretch.

~ what replaced it ~

The odd afterlife is that OZO is not a dead brand. Nokia kept the name and moved it onto the audio work, so OZO Audio and OZO Playback now ship inside phones from Oppo, OnePlus, Asus and the HMD-built Nokia handsets. If you have recorded a video on one of those and the wind noise came out tolerable, that is the surviving piece of a discontinued VR camera.

Which is a strange sort of ending. The eight lenses are gone and the microphones stayed. Nokia spent the money to build a professional 3D camera and got out of it a feature that makes clips shot on a phone sound slightly better than they should, licensed to competitors, on a product line it no longer makes.

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