Inside Valley – How VR headsets could transform in-car entertainment
Audi partner Holoride wants to make long car journeys enjoyable – with a VR game that adapts in real time to the car's steering and motion.
In this episode of Inside Valley I test an unusual mobility product: VR headsets in a moving car. Berlin start-up Holoride, in which Audi holds a stake as an industry partner, wants to turn long car journeys into an entertainment experience – one that adapts in real time to the car’s steering, speed and acceleration.
What is at stake
Holoride spun out of the Audi innovation lab in Ingolstadt in 2019. The idea: the car’s sensor data – how it turns, brakes, accelerates – is transmitted to a VR headset in the back seat. This ensures that the virtual world in the headset moves synchronously with the real movement of the car. When the car turns right, the spaceship in the game turns right in exactly the same way.
Why motion sickness is the real enemy
The effect is striking – and it solves a core problem with VR in cars. Anyone who reads in the back seat quickly gets headaches or nausea because the inner ear senses movement while the eyes do not. VR normally makes this problem dramatically worse. Holoride reverses that: because the virtual scenery matches the real movement of the car, the signals in the brain come back into sync. Instead of motion sickness, the result is entertainment. For parents keeping children occupied on back-seat journeys, and for commuters covering long distances, this is a genuine improvement.
Where the system still has rough edges
In the practical test it is not yet entirely smooth. The headset is a consumer-market VR device, so it is fairly bulky. The selection of games and applications is limited. And of course the car must be able to transmit sensor data to the headset – currently only a handful of models can do this. Holoride is betting that as autonomy increases and driver attention decreases, the demand for passenger entertainment will grow. Plausible – but not automatic.
Why the approach remains interesting
When autonomous driving becomes a reality, passengers will spend more time on other activities because they no longer need to steer. Streaming in the car, meetings in the car, games in the car – that is the billion-dollar market that manufacturers like Audi, BMW and Mercedes want to capture. Holoride is one of the few providers that has already built a working product for this. Whether it fills a niche or becomes a mass-market product will be decided in the next few years – and depends on whether other carmakers follow Audi’s strategy.