Jaunt's crazy multi-lens camera records insanely immersive movies for the Oculus Rift

Home / News / Jaunt’s crazy multi-lens camera records insanely immersive movies for the Oculus Rift

If our eyes-on time with the Oculus Rift is anything to go by, it’s going to knock people off their feet when it eventually hits shelves.

We’ve already looked at some non-gaming uses for the Rift, and now there’s one more item to add to the list. Teleportation.

Not literally of course, but virtually. And it all starts with a company called Jaunt Inc.

[Image credits: Gizmodo]

Its product, Jaunt, is a complete recording solution aimed at creating extremely immersive movies specifically for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus. And it’s all centred around one hell of a crazy camera.

While the final design is still a secret, all the prototypes that have been shown off so far have one thing in common. They’re littered with lenses.

Unlike a single lens which passably stitches together photos to create a panorama, each of the lenses in the Jaunt captures 360° video simultaneously from every angle. It doesn’t get much more immersive than that.

Jaunt then works its software magic by extracting all of the captured video and converting it into a seamless virtual world which lets you explore it freely from every angle using a VR headset like the Oculus Rift.

Audio too, is critical when it comes to immersion, and the Jaunt delivers here too. A 3D microphone captures audio which, combined with a headset, envelops you in a whole other layer of immersive detail.

Thanks to the Rift’s head-tracking abilities, the audio is able to change and mix around your headphones depending on what position you’re facing the sound from.

While a number of made-for-Oculus-Rift films exist, we’ve yet to see anything match up to what the Jaunt recording system is capable of.

It’s all extremely exciting, and it give us precisely the same fuzzy feeling in our stomachs that we used to get when reading about X-Ray specs and hoverboads as kids.

Except this time, it’s real, and very much on the way. And we seriously cannot wait to strap in.

[Jaunt, Gizmodo]

About

Esat has been a gadget fan ever since his tiny four-year-old brain was captivated by a sound-activated dancing sunflower. From there it was a natural progression to a Sega Mega Drive, a brief obsession with hedgehogs, and a love for all things tech. After 7 years as a writer and deputy editor for Stuff, Esat ventured out into the corporate world, spending three years as Editor of Microsoft's European News Centre. Now a freelance writer, his appetite for shiny gadgets has no bounds. Oh, and like all good human beings, he's very fond of cats.