Sony Pictures Partners With Nokia on Virtual Reality Content

Sony Pictures has teamed up with Nokia to produce and distribute virtual reality content, both companies announced Monday. This will include live streaming of 360-degree video to get fans a virtual front row seat at Sony Pictures events.

As part of the collaboration, Sony Pictures is going to use Nokia’s OZO virtual reality camera to produce 360-degree 3D videos. Sony will also add Nokia’s SDK to its Privilege Plus app, which is exclusively available for Sony-made mobile phones.

“Partnerships with cutting edge technology companies like Nokia are critical as we develop the market for VR experiences and build scale in our production and distribution efforts,” said Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Digital Sales SVP Pete Wood Monday.

Nokia first debuted its Ozo VR camera a little over a year ago. The company began taking preorders for Ozo in December, but companies have to pay a hefty price tag for Ozo: Nokia is charging $60,000 for each camera, with additional equipment costing thousands more.

Nokia isn’t the only company looking to get studios to adopt their solution for VR capture and production. Light field specialist Lytro recently began to show some of the work based on its volumetric VR video camera, and Disney-backed Jaunt has been touting its own VR capture solution. All of them are getting competition from Google, which has been using some advanced science for its own cloud-based 3D VR system called JUMP.

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