The next big thing for your car is not a new radio system! Your next car could come ready with its own virtual reality entertainment system. Recently announced at the SXSW festival in Austin, Holoride, a tech start-up is promising to turn ‘vehicles into moving theme parks’, bringing VR headsets to some Audi SUVs and sedans over the summer.
Virtual reality is slowly but surely taking over a number of industries all over the world. In fact, nearly one in five U.S. consumers have used VR in 2020. This proved to be a rise from the 16% in 2019. Most users are happy and satisfied with the experience, with 55% of them saying that they are extremely or moderately satisfied with VR. VR is making life easier for engineers and designers to experiment and test vehicles in the automotive industry. It is also becoming more and more popular in industries such as healthcare, retail, tourism, and real estate. The same even applies in the online gambling industry, where you’ll be able to enjoy the live casino experience brought to you by the same providers behind some of the best new slots, such as Big Time Gaming and Nolimit City.
With Holoride’s new system, Audi passengers will be able to mix what they see on their journey with augmented reality elements via motion-synchronization technology. Passengers will be able to enter a virtual office to join a work meeting, or fly over rainforests, all from the comfort of their car’s backseat. Holoride also claims that their technology has the ability to adapt the experiences to each trips’ length, location, and driving style to bring passengers with a new experience every time that they’re in the car.
Holoride will be able to monetise on how many hours people spend in their car per year. Holoride and other companies are also looking to create possible self-driving cars in the future. In this world, everyone can be a passenger and there will be other opportunities for more products to be created that can be used for entertainment during car journeys. This news also comes at a time when VR headsets are starting to gain popularity and traction with customers.
Holoride teamed up with TerraNet, Swedish software development firm in 2019 to create sensors and software that is needed for a vehicle to translate data into VR responses. Audi still holds a minority interest in this VR company through Audi Electronics Venture. However, Holoride is not exclusive to Audi, and it will be using an open platform to market its new system.
Rudolf Baumeister, Holoride’s director of marketing and communications claims that, ‘we are always open to working with other automotive car manufacturers and hope to make as many vehicles Holoride-capable as possible. [W]e’ve developed our technology so that the real world and virtual world are synced. This means that what you see and what you feel lineup with almost no latency — this reduces motion sickness.’
Holoride has partnered with multiple automotive, gaming, technology, and media firms, including Porsche and Schell Games to build up its content platform. The HTC VIVE Flow will be the first VR headset that will be fully equipped with Holoride’s system.
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