With the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all due for release before the end of the year, there's no doubt 2016 is the year of virtual reality. And yet, with such a focus on headset hardware, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of software and content needed to make VR work. Enter Nokia.

Now freed from the cut-throat mobile market, the Finnish company is hoping to kickstart VR content creation with the Ozo, a high-quality VR camera with eight camera sensors and eight microphones spread across a not-quite-sphere. It outputs 360-degree 3D video and surround audio through a single cable, bypassing all the issues faced when trying to get the same effect from a DIY assemblage of GoPro or Red cameras.

Before you get your credit card out, ready to be the first VR YouTuber with 10 million subs, there's one caveat we must point out: the Nokia Ozo costs an eye-watering €55,000 (£43,000, $60,000). This is most definitely a professional tool, not merely something to help with shooting interminable holiday panoramas.

But bear with me, because despite the exorbitant price tag, this thing is important.

Learning to love the alien

It wasn't that long ago that the Nokia name was plastered on phones—often cheap ones at that. Then Microsoft came along, snapped up Nokia's phone division, and has used it to churn out Lumia-branded phones since. "Our business, what was left over, was a licensing company," says Guido Voltolina, head of "Presence Capture" at Nokia. Since then what we've seen from Nokia is a tablet, the N1. Despite initial interest, it came and went without much market impact. But in truth Nokia didn't have that much to do with it.

"The N1 was a product that was licensed to an external company," says Voltolina. "It was under the Nokia brand because we enabled them to do so. We didn't make that product or market that product. We just gave them the brand to sell the product."

The Ozo is not a simple licensing deal, though. This is a Nokia-designed, Nokia-made device.

"In November 2013 [Ozo] was two engineers buying parts and going to management saying we want to work on this project," continued Voltolina. "'Here is one frame captured with this future system' that will allow us to do this. It was one frame, the proof of concept. This was before Oculus was even bought by Facebook. From a pre-market analysis view it was: VR happened in the past, god knows if it's going to happen in the future."

The project grew slowly until Nokia realised its fortuitous timing, which helps explain its obsession with being first to market. "We were very lucky we started right before it was obvious," says Voltolina. "It gave us a market advantage. I know that everyone is working on a camera solution now."

Naturally, I have to ask about the Ozo's rather odd design, a weird cross between an alien spacecraft and a tadpole that's had its tail docked. "It's a skull," says Voltolina. "It looks kind of small but trust me, it's the average skull size." Skull or not, the Ozo's odd looks are there to facilitate the four pairs of cameras peeking out of its body, which together provide a full 360-degree 3D view of the world. Its housing is milled aluminium, and the whole thing weighs a hefty 4.2kg.

"Each lens covers 195 degrees, so there's a huge overlap between each camera. The reason for this overlap is to create two layers of pixels, for the left and right eye," says Voltolina. These lenses have an even wider field of view than a GoPro (usually 170 degrees), which you can appreciate when you get up-close with the Ozo and look at the pronounced curvature on each of the glass lenses. The data from the four sets of eyes and the eight microphones is compiled and recorded internally, or fed out through a single industry-standard SDI cable, with a stream bandwidth of 1Gbps—the maximum the cable can handle.

On the tail of the Ozo is a slot-in module that houses 500GB storage and a battery that lets you shoot for 45 minutes from a single charge. You could, of course, take several out with you on longer shoots. Internal processing is handled by "one of the top of the line FPGAs," which synchronises and compiles the camera data. An FPGA's (field-programmable gate array) processing power can't really be compared to a typical x86 CPU, because it's custom-made for a very specific task, but there's no doubting it's doing a lot of work in compiling eight video and audio channels on-the-fly.

The Nokia Ozo uses JPEG 2000 to encode visual data but with a custom container and implementation that Nokia is responsible for. That container allows Nokia to retain all of the original data from each sensor, even when it overlaps, giving VR filmmakers more flexibility when editing and tweaking the footage. "We create these super frames of all the eight frames and send them out," says Voltolina. "We don't stitch them [together], we keep them separate."

Footage can be sent over Wi-Fi at short distances using the same Wi-Fi remote application used to control the Ozo or sent over several kilometres when plugged in via a cable. Even if you don't have the remote to hand, the unit itself handily features a few buttons that let you control capture.