Holoride Brings VR Entertainment to the Car

share on:
Holoride

Holoride, a startup developing a virtual reality entertainment system for the car, was first introduced at CES in January.  It’s a spin off company of Audi, but it has now teamed up with Ford and Universal Pictures to offer its first public in-car demonstrations at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood, CA over the next month.

With Holoride, the VR experience is tied to the movement of the car, so if you are in a virtual reality game taking place underwater, when the car accelerates so does your underwater adventure, and when the car takes a corner, you experience the same motion in your virtual world.   For the demo this month, the VR game is a ‘Bride of Frankenstein experience.’  Passengers will take a 5 to 10 minute backseat ride in a new Ford Explorer using VR googles and a controller.

“We want to change the passenger experience of vehicles globally, in as many vehicles as we can, so that passengers are able to experience stories, worlds, characters they love no matter which brand they’re sitting in,” Holoride CEO Nils Wollny told The Verge.

A market for in-car virtual entertainment experiences could include Uber, Lyft, and other ride share customers.  Imagine ordering an Uber with the “Marvel Avengers Experience,” for example. The audience for this kind of entertainment could be sizable.  Uber alone handles 15 million rides a day, globally.

Would VR work in the aftermarket?

VOXX’s Joe Caltabiano said the technology could be used in aftermarket rear seat entertainment. “We are monitoring it and researching it, but not looking to implement it, at least not in the next 12 months,” he said, adding, “It’s not something that would be difficult to integrate.  It’s just like taking an overhead or headrest monitor and integrating it into a wearable.”  The system would require an installed sensor such as a gyro sensor to pick up the car’s motion and a means of transferring the information to the googles, he said.  Then there’s the issue of price.

Holoride’s Bride of Frankenstein experience will be offered October 14-16, October 21-23, October 28th–30th, and November 4-9.

Source: The Verge, TechCrunch

 

 

Want to receive industry news? Sign up here
share on:

4 Comments

  1. First one to clock the driver in the back of the head wins, I don’t think so, sorry. Try another revenue stream.

  2. Good god, the amount of puking going on will be horrible. VR in a room in a house takes a lot of conditioning and time to learn for your body, to fight nausea and headaches. Then you try and odd motion from a vehicle not in sync with ANYTHING going on in VR, and that’s a huge recipe for disaster.

    1. Good point, but apparently by syncing the motion of the VR to the car motion, it helps relieve motion sickness.

      1. Not to mention it eliminates the whole pesky “having to interact with the (so lame) family” thingy or “OMG I don’t want to look at, like, actual scenery out a, you know, window or whatever when I can be ski-ing in the Alps with my virtual super cool family instead !!”
        Pathetic.

Comments are closed.