Nokia uses the force to promote its VR offering

Nokia has announced a multi-year virtual reality technology agreement with The Walt Disney Studios, built around the release of ‘Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ later this year.

The multi-year agreement between Nokia and The Walt Disney Studios is designed to show off Nokia’s capabilities in virtual reality. As part of the partnership, Nokia will provide production staff with an OZO VR camera and software solutions to create the new content for future marketing campaigns. Previous similar partnerships with movies include Pete’s Dragon, Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Jungle Book.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Lucasfilm and Disney to bring the magic of immersive VR storytelling to one of the most exciting and anticipated movie experiences of all time,” said Brad Rodrigues, Interim President of Nokia Technologies. “OZO will enable Star Wars fans around the world to be transported into the incredible worlds depicted in the story, and truly feel the power of The Force together.”

On a more technical level, the team has also had a go at tackling the complications of video-on-demand storage and delivery. Nokia Bell Labs has released a new product which claims to address the high cost of storing time-shifted video. ‘Skim storage’ removes a large proportion of the complexity of just-in-time transcoding (JITX), which saves on processing power and reduces latency to improve the experience of on-demand video, Nokia states.

“As the TV industry is moving to IP, adaptive bit-rate streaming is becoming the de facto technology for delivering TV services, but it comes with its challenges,” said Paul Larbey, Head of Nokia’s IP Video business. “We have developed unique innovations that make this technology even more robust for live TV, and deliver a massively improved business case for time-shifted TV.”