Lytro’s Immerge Light Field camera is meant for professional high-end VR productions. It may be a beast of a rig, but it’s capable of capturing some of the best looking volumetric video that I’ve had my eyes on yet. The company has revealed a major update to the camera, the Immerge 2.0, which, through a few smart tweaks, makes for much more efficient production and higher quality output.

Light-field specialist Lytro, which picked up a $60 million Series D investment earlier this year, is making impressive strides in its Light Field capture and playback technology. The company is approaching Light Field from both live-action and synthetic ends; last month Lytro announced Volume Tracer, a software which generates Light Fields from pre-rendered CG content, enabling ultra-high fidelity VR imagery that retains immersive 6DOF viewing.

On the live-action end, the company has been building a high-end light-field camera which they call Immerge. Designed for high-end productions, the camera is actually a huge array of individual lenses which all work in unison to capture light-fields of the real world.

At a recent visit to the company’s Silicon Valley office, Lytro exclusively revealed to Road to VR latest iteration of the camera, which they’re calling Immerge 2.0. The form-factor is largely the same as before—an array of lenses all working together to capture the scene from many simultaneous viewpoints—but you’ll note an important difference if you look closely: the Immerge 2.0 has alternating rows of cameras pointed off-axis in opposite directions.

With the change to the camera angles, and tweaks to the underlying software, the lenses on Immerge 2.0 effectively act as one giant camera that has a wider field of view than any of the individual lenses, now 120 degrees (compared to 90 degrees on the Immerge 1.0).

https://www.roadtovr.com/exclusive-lytro-reveals-immerge-2-0-light-field-camera-improved-quality-faster-captures/