Nokia

Nokia
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Telecommunications, Networking equipment, Consumer electronics
Founded	12 May 1865 (Tampere, Grand Duchy of Finland)
Founder	Fredrik Idestam
Headquarters	Espoo, Finland
Notable Personnel	Justin Hotard (President and CEO), Timo Ihamuotila (Chairman)
Products	Telecommunications network infrastructure, OZO virtual reality camera (2015-2017), technology and brand licensing
Website	https://www.nokia.com

Nokia (officially Nokia Corporation, in Finnish Nokia Oyj) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, networking, and technology company headquartered in Espoo, Finland. It was founded in 1865 as a pulp mill and later became a dominant maker of mobile phones before refocusing on telecommunications network infrastructure and technology licensing. In Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality it is best known for the Nokia OZO, a professional spherical stereoscopic VR camera sold from 2015 until Nokia ended its production in 2017, and for its later work on streaming Extended Reality over 5G mobile networks.

Nokia entered the VR market through Nokia Technologies, the part of the company that, after the 2014 sale of its handset business to Microsoft, held its research, patents, and brand-licensing activities. The OZO was its only consumer-facing VR hardware product. Nokia withdrew from VR camera hardware in October 2017 and redirected Nokia Technologies toward digital health and patent and brand licensing.

Company background

Nokia was founded on 12 May 1865 by the mining engineer Fredrik Idestam, who built a groundwood pulp mill on the Tammerkoski rapids in Tampere, in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. The company took its name from the Nokianvirta River and the town of Nokia, where Idestam opened a second mill in 1868. Over the twentieth century it grew into a conglomerate spanning rubber, cable, and electronics, and from the late 1980s it concentrated on telecommunications. During the 1990s and 2000s Nokia was the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones.

In 2014 Nokia sold its Devices and Services (handset) business to Microsoft and reorganized around network infrastructure, retaining its patent portfolio and brand in a unit called Nokia Technologies. Rights to make Nokia-branded phones later passed to the separate company HMD Global. As of 2026 Nokia operates mainly in mobile, fixed, and cloud network infrastructure and in technology licensing; its president and chief executive is Justin Hotard, who took the role on 1 April 2025.

Nokia OZO

The Nokia OZO is a professional VR camera that records Stereoscopic (3D) 360-degree video together with spatial audio. It was conceived at Nokia's research and development facility in Tampere, Finland, and unveiled on 28 July 2015 at an event in Los Angeles, where Nokia described it as a camera built specifically for professional VR production. The OZO was positioned against other early 360-degree capture efforts of the period, including the rigs and cameras made by Jaunt and GoPro, but at a far higher price point aimed at studios and broadcasters rather than consumers.

Design and specifications

The OZO is a spherical, aluminum-alloy camera body carrying eight synchronized camera sensors and eight integrated microphones arranged around the sphere. Each lens has a 195-degree field of view, and the eight 2K by 2K global-shutter sensors together cover a full 360 by 180 degree sphere, recording at 30 frames per second. The eight microphones capture spatial (3D) audio that is matched to the video. Footage is written to a removable digital cartridge that holds roughly 45 minutes of recording.

A feature Nokia emphasized was real-time preview. Conventional 360-degree rigs required separately recorded camera feeds to be stitched together in post-production before a director could see the result, whereas the OZO's paired software let an operator monitor a live VR preview on set without first assembling a panoramic image.

Specification	Detail
Camera sensors	Eight global-shutter sensors, 2K x 2K each
Lens field of view	195 degrees per lens
Coverage	360 x 180 degree sphere (stereoscopic 3D)
Frame rate	30 frames per second
Audio	Eight integrated microphones for spatial audio
Body	Aluminum alloy, spherical
Storage	Removable digital cartridge, about 45 minutes

Software and OZO Live

The OZO was sold with software for capture, review, and delivery rather than as a camera alone. At the 2016 NAB Show, Nokia announced OZO Live, a system for real-time 360-degree broadcasting that became available to selected partners in the second quarter of 2016 and more broadly in the third quarter. OZO Live supported both monoscopic (2D) and stereoscopic (3D) 360 output, allowed switching between multiple OZO units, and could deliver encoded streams to services such as YouTube 360 and Facebook 360 over standard RTMP ingest.

Pricing and availability

Nokia announced commercial availability of the OZO on 1 December 2015 at a price of 60,000 US dollars, with shipments beginning in the first quarter of 2016. In August 2016 it cut the price by 15,000 US dollars to 45,000 US dollars, calling the reduction a move to drive adoption, and announced a launch in China in partnership with the Chinese online video company LeEco and its VR division LeVR. By the time production was wound down in October 2017 the OZO was listed at about 25,000 US dollars in Nokia's online store. In April 2017 Nokia had also released OZO+, a firmware and software upgrade for the existing camera that doubled the broadcast resolution to roughly 4K per eye rather than a new hardware model.

Notable use

Because of its price the OZO was used mainly by studios, broadcasters, and production companies rather than individual creators. The Walt Disney Company began using the OZO for filmmaking in 2016 under an agreement to explore 360-degree content for film promotion.

Discontinuation

On 10 October 2017 Nokia announced it would stop developing the OZO camera and hardware, cutting up to 310 of the roughly 1,090 jobs in Nokia Technologies, mainly in Finland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Nokia attributed the decision to the slower-than-expected development of the VR market and said Nokia Technologies would instead focus on digital health (building on its 2016 acquisition of the French health-device maker Withings) and on patent and brand licensing. Nokia said it would continue to support existing OZO customers despite halting hardware updates. Gregory Lee, then president of Nokia Technologies, said the changes were necessary but that the company was committed to supporting affected employees.

5G and streamed XR

After leaving VR camera hardware, Nokia's connection to VR and AR shifted to its core networking business and the problem of delivering Extended Reality over mobile networks. High-quality XR is computationally heavy, so a common approach is split rendering, in which the heaviest graphics work runs on an edge or cloud server and the result is streamed to a lightweight headset; this depends on very low network latency and stable throughput, which Nokia has framed as a use case for 5G and future 6G networks.

In November 2023 Nokia announced a collaboration with the enterprise XR company Hololight to use L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable throughput), a networking technology originally developed by Nokia Bell Labs, to improve cloud-rendered XR. The two companies presented a proof of concept at the Brooklyn 6G Summit that tested L4S with a scalable number of XR users connected to the same infrastructure, aiming to keep latency low as the number of simultaneous users grew.