Holoride VR Technology Coming To Audi Cars This Summer

JAKARTA - Audi will place virtual reality (VR) in every car it produces. This step was taken by Audi by establishing a new company called Holoride.

Holoride is here to bring a VR experience to the backseat of every car, be it a Ford, Mercedes or Chrysler Pacifica minivan.

In Holoride, Audi is a minority shareholder through its subsidiary Audi Electronics Venture. Audi will license the technology to Holoride and the startup will use the open platform to allow any automaker as well as content developer to create any reality format they want.

Nils Wollny, head of digital business at Audi co-founded Holoride with Marcus Kühne, who leads Audi's VR experience project and Daniel Profendiner, a software engineer at the company. Wollny is the CEO of Holoride.

The story of Holoride's founding does not have a single starting point. Profendiner and Kühne did not know each other. But both are working on the same patent application to use VR as a sales application and for simulation purposes. “We had the same idea because we wrote the same patent,” said Profendiner, who then built a prototype to show Kühne, quoted by TechCrunch.

The pair introduced the idea to Wollny, who recognized a much bigger opportunity, the two said.

“Today's car entertainment is limited, the screen is small, people are sick. Here we are expanding on this potential," Profendiner told TechCrunch before a demo at CES 2019.

The interesting part is what Holoride has planned with this technology. The company wants to make this an open platform and agnostic in every way.

Holoride hopes to have a software development kit by the end of the year that can be shared with content and game developers. The SDK will serve as an interface to the vehicle data and transfer it into virtual reality.

This allows developers to create movies and games that will sync with the user's movements while they are sitting in the back seat of the vehicle. Conventional movies, series or presentations can also be watched with a significantly reduced chance of motion sickness, according to Audi.

Holoride plans to launch VR entertainment on the market within the next three years using standard VR glasses for backseat passengers. The company saw other opportunities to expand and incorporate the surrounding environment, such as traffic jams, into the experience.

For example, stopping at a traffic light could cause unexpected obstacles to a game or interrupt a learning program with quick quizzes, the company said.