Holoride and Audi enhances traveling by bringing Virtual Reality-blended games in cars, that’s completely impressive and groundbreaking.
Long-distance travels are not as exciting as it seems. Most of the times, passengers feel sleepy, or you may not be in the mood of chatting or talking with co-passengers or sometimes it’s simply boring for no reasons. For people of longer commutes, traveling might be repetitive and dull. And automakers noticed this, planned something that would entertain or keep the passengers engaging in the travel, simultaneously pool in the money into their pocket for the service.
When it comes to entertaining, what’s there more impressive than Virtual reality? Audi saw this opportunity and dove in for making your travel enjoyable with Holoride technology.
What is Holoride?
Holoride is a Munich-based company that aims to merge Virtual-Reality technology with car’s data for rendering an immersive gaming or touring experience while traveling.
Audi by owning a part of Holoride, becomes the first auto-manufacturer to incorporate holoride technology into cars. The back-seat passengers will be wearing a VR head-mounted display (HMD) such as HTC VIVE Flow, that hosts gaming or other experiences blended with the car’s software system. All kinds of information from the car such as speed, drive-mode, location, navigation, turns and stops are fed into the virtual-reality tech, in order to give you the feel that’s realistically virtual.
For example, if the car is moving fast, the character or avatar in the game will be moving so, and if the car is stopped, the character would also stop in the virtual world. If the car makes a right-turn, so does the avatar. It takes the travel experience to a whole new level.
Technology behind Holoride
Holoride’s technology tweaks passengers’ travel with virtual reality that fetches a motion-synchronized journey. Holoride had partnered with Terranet, a Swedish ADAS software development company, to affix sensors around the car that would capture and interpret the environment quickly and accurately for inputting them into VR system. Terranet’s VoxelFlow system allows to make VR movements based on data points from car.
The VR system is so advanced that it takes the input from the navigation system and enables holoride gaming to know roughly how much longer the game is gonna be, and where the upcoming turns are, to provide a realistic feel with the travelling. They call it ‘elastic content’. Say if you are operating a flying saucer or a submarine in the game, the VR system adapts to the car’s movements, so the VR journey mimics everything the driver does with the car – turns, stops, acceleration, braking and so on.
Marvel’s director Joseph Russo calls the technology “dramatically experiential” and “all-consuming”.
The technology also addresses motion sickness, claims Holoride.
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Not only Gaming, but also Tours & Educative
Holoride is not monotonously into gaming, but also provides other engaging stuffs like edutainment offerings, such as a prehistoric learning adventure with a T-rex for kids. It also drives a new way of exploring a city by virtual city tour.
At the 2021 Saltzburg Festival, Audi used the technology to allow passengers to take a motion-synchronized tour through the city as it was hundreds of years ago.
Audi’s holoride
To witness the holoride experience, passengers need to wear a VR head-mounted display and the car should be holoride-compatible. Audi brings the adventure in its several models including, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, Q5, Q7, Q8, e-Tron, e-Tron Sportback, and e-Tron GT.
For availing the holoride, Audi users need to check the compatibility of the car by heading to ‘Services’ in the Settings of myAudi app. Holoride offers a ‘Pioneers’ pack for your Audi car for $657, if it’s compatible.
The Pioneers’ Pack includes HTC VIVE Flow headset, 8BitDO Pro 2 Gamepad, seat belt safety strap and a one-year subscription for the technology priced at $190 annually or about $20/month. You will be able to experience holoride on your headset only if your HTC VIVE Flow firmware version is 1.84.623.01 or higher.
There’s also subscription for holoride technology that costs $9.99 / month, billed annually. So, if you put together the costs, it comes around nearly $680 initially to avail the facility.
Here is the procedure on how to connect holoride with Audi.
Is Holoride available in other Cars?
Holoride besides Audi’s partnership, has now collided with Porsche and Ford and these automakers might be the next in line to offer this immersive experience.
Holoride is currently available only in Germany, Austria and US and the firm is looking forward to widen the facility in European countries, China, Japan and countries in NA and then everywhere around the globe.
As autonomous vehicles take the roads, people want entertainment inside the cars, and that’s when holoride takes off, hoping to extend further in future. Immersive automotive AR & VR technologies market is projected to hit $674 million by 2025, according to an Allied Market Research report.
And VR techs in cars would no-longer be an exciting thing in future, as most of the cars would have so.
Watch the experience:
Do you like to have VR into your car? What you think of this bloom of technology?
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