VR

Back in mid-2015, as interest in virtual reality headsets was heating up, Nokia announced a $60,000 spherical virtual reality camera called the OZO. This week, Nokia announced that it will be halting development of the camera system and cutting 310 jobs in the process.

Qualcomm, which creates mobile processors, is pioneering a new active depth sensor that will probably make its way to Android phones next year via their upcoming 2nd generation Snapdragon processor.

Virtual reality is an up and coming industry. Big jumps are being made, with many genres of photography and film getting on board. But VR has always been limited in its resolution, with the experience feeling a bit pixelated to the user. Finnish startup Varjo wants to change this with "human eye resolution."

Google announced this week that they are releasing a new certification standard that they are calling “Street View Ready”. This certification will be used for 360° cameras that are able to publish to Street View, and are guaranteed to support the level of quality required for Google’s 360-degree mapping service.

If you want a more immersive experience from your Mavic Pro or Phantom 4, DJI's got you covered. Almost a year after they first teased them, DJI has officially released the DJI Goggles: a pair of VR-like FPV goggles that let you control your drone camera with your head.

GoPro today announced a brand new product called the GoPro Fusion. It's a spherical camera that can shoot 360-degree photos and videos... in 5.2K resolution.

Virtual reality cameras just got real. Literally. The D3-U is the world's first physical "camera" device that's designed to take photos in virtual worlds.

London-based design studio Wolf in Motion has launched Magic Hour, a new VR experience that lets you do advanced photography in a virtual world.

Canon has built its own Oculus Rift app, giving users a virtual environment where they can go out and improve their composition skills while they try out some of the gear they've been lusting over.

Google's Android Experiments platform is all about wacky ideas, and the company's own experimental app Sprayscape is nothing if not wacky. Using your smartphone's camera and gyroscope, the app lets you paint 'perfectly imperfect' VR-ish 360° photos.

Kodak has released the third generation of its Pixpro SP360 action camera, and if you've been following Photokina news, it'll look very familiar. That's because it's basically just a pared down version of Nikon's KeyMission 360.

Google released the Cardboard Camera app back in December, but until this week it was Android only. Well, no longer. The iOS version of the app just launched, enabling iPhone users to capture and share immersive 360° VR photos in a snap.

In 2015, light-field camera startup Lytro did a huge pivot, redirecting its focus from consumer light-field cameras (the original and the Illum) to its new light field virtual reality camera, the Immerge. Today the company released a first peek at what the Immerge can do.

When astrophotography enthusiast Stephen King of Yakima, Washington, asked his then-girlfriend Andrea to marry him recently, he did so in a creative and unusual way: with a 360-degree night sky photo inside a Google Cardboard VR viewer.

Getty Images, one of the largest stock photo agencies in the world and the official photo agency of the International Olympic Committee, is preparing for Rio by embracing the role of virtual reality in photography's future.

Have a virtual reality headset and enjoy browsing Instagram photos? Instamuseum is a new app that lets you combine those two things: it turns Instagram accounts into a virtual reality museum that you can "walk around" in.

360° video and virtual reality headsets have made it possible to experience situations you would never in a thousand years want to see first-hand, and high on that list is driving up to or getting steamrolled by a powerful tornado.

Curious if you have what it takes to be an action/sports photographer? What about a combat photographer? Or wildlife photographer? If you don't know for sure, this new Pokenmon Snap-like 'VR Photography Experience' might help you find out.

GoPro has released the first sample footage shot using its new Omni virtual reality camera rig, which combines views from 6 separate cameras to create an immersive 360-degree video experience.

Optical stabilization has slowly but surely continued to improve in recent years, but a new patent from Canon hints at a major change in the tech that may arrive in future lenses: instead of one image stabilized lens group, the patent describes a lens that uses two.

GoPro may have just introduced their own 360° video solution, but they're not the only dog in this fight. The tiny little Orah 4i camera by VideoStitch is a more portable, easier to use 4K 360° solution that does something more: it can live-stream the VR quality footage it's capturing.

VR is growing fast, and companies like GoPro don't want to be left in the dust. A single GoPro can't shoot 360° video, and so far multi-GoPro 360° rigs are all third party. Well, no more. Today we get to meet the Omni: GoPro's official VR camera rig.

Samsung today announced a new virtual reality camera called the Samsung Gear 360. It's a ball-shaped camera that lets anyone easily capture 360-degree photos and videos.

Don't have the time or money to visit a photo exhibition you're interested in? In the future, paying a visit will be as simple as strapping a virtual reality headset to your head.

At EyeEm's Photo Hack Day 4 in Berlin recently, one of the apps developed was called Rooms. It's a virtual reality Android app that lets you enjoy photos in a virtual photo exhibition, and the app gives us a taste of what may soon be commonplace in the world of art.

Homido mini is a new virtual reality viewer that's designed to be a smaller and sleeker alternative to Google Cardboard.

Nikon surprised the photo industry yesterday by announcing its very first action camera, the KeyMission 360, which shoots 360° photos and videos in 4K resolution. Now the company has released a set of first 360-degree interactive videos on YouTube to show what the camera can do.

Nikon surprised everyone today by announcing an entirely new type of camera at CES 2016 in Vegas. The Nikon KeyMission 360 is a new wearable, waterproof action camera that can capture 360-degree footage in 4K.

Flickr today announced its new virtual reality app for the Samsung Gear VR headset, allowing people to experience 360° photos hosted on the service through an immersive virtual reality experience. The photo sharing service began teasing this new VR experience back in September.

Back in 2011, photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck helped coin and popularize the "cinemagraph," an animated GIF showing a mostly static photo with certain elements moving and looping.

Now, as the world of virtual reality is starting to take off in a big way, photographer Eran Amir is taking the cinemagraph to a new dimension: 3D. He has created a series of virtual reality cinemagraphs, which you can watch in the 2.5-minute video above.

Lytro today announced Immerge, a new camera that may revolutionize how virtual reality content is captured. The company calls it "the world's first professional light field solution for Cinematic VR."

The rise of virtual reality photojournalism will get a huge boost this weekend thanks to the New York Times. The newspaper's Sunday bundle for print subscribers will include a free Google Cardboard viewer for experiencing immersive photo and video content. Over 1 million units will be shipping with the paper, and another 300,000 will be sent to digital subscribers as well.

Earlier this year, YouTube opened up its service to 360-degree interactive videos that you can "look around" in while watching, whether by swiping with your finger or by swinging your phone around in space. This week, Facebook also joined in on the fun by announcing that virtual reality videos are now supported in News Feeds.

The American news media company RYOT recently sent its World Editor, Christian Stephen, to the war-ravaged streets of Aleppo, Syria. While there, he used a 360° camera to capture the world's first virtual reality film of the inside of a war zone.

It's an immersive short film that gives viewers a unique perspective into what the Syrian civil war has done to the country's largest city.

Virtual reality is one of the trending technologies that tech companies are pouring vast amounts of time and research into, and one company that wants in is Flickr. The photo sharing company is working on a virtual reality photo viewing experience that may be integrated into its service in the future.

We are on the fringe of widespread virtual reality that can truly captivate our minds and take us places we've only dreamt about. Services such as Roundme continue to bring these worlds a step closer every day. By utilizing a network of 360-degree imagery and a platform designed for professionals, advanced virtual tours are only a tap away.

Nokia has announced that they will be releasing ‘OZO’, the first commercially available virtual reality camera, later this year. The company says the device has been “designed and built for professional content creators, and [is] the first in a planned portfolio of digital media solutions.” The unit features eight synchronized global shutter sensors, eight integrated microphones for spatial audio, and a design reminiscent of the Star Wars training remote.

Jaunt is a virtual reality company with enough confidence to proudly claim the tagline of ‘the future of cinematic VR’. Aimed at creating high-profile cinematic virtual reality experiences through their camera technology, the company has announced their latest product. The Jaunt Neo is aimed at professionals looking to capture fully immersive 360-degree experiences.