There’s one voice in the darkness, a single singer solemnly making declarations about music and the court of song. Other voices come in, and then the same singer is there in five places around me, harmonizing. And he does seem there, song enveloping me.

Hallelujah is the latest video from Within, an acapella rendition of Leonard Cohen’s famed tune. It is a sacredly soft version, only performed by one man, Bobby Halvorson. But in contrast, it is boldly presented, as the video is a partnership with Lytro, and uses their lightfield camera for VR to capture the singer and the church he later stands in.

“To get to really great VR, you need a whole new set of tools and technology to make the content,” said Jason Rosenthal, the CEO of Lytro. “Hallelujah is the first example of what things might be able to look like when you’re doing true volumetric capture.”

The promise of Lytro’s camera is to not flatly capture the image of a place, but all of the spatial qualities a place. What does that mean? Well, unlike most of the live-action VR videos at Tribeca this year, it isn’t just 360-degree video. Nor is it simple 3D. It is a volume with a full six-degrees of freedom, more like the animated VR shorts, but not generated by artists at a computer. It is our live-action world recorded as data and then all that data processed into a volume.

Read the full article at Upload VR.