Earlier this month, holoride [sic] announced that they would be offering free car rides in Los Angeles to give the public a taste of the startup’s newest virtual reality (VR) initiative: immersive VR gaming that’s synced up with a moving car.
holoride is a startup based in Munich and co-founded by Audi that made its grand entrance in January of 2019 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an annual trade show in Las Vegas that deals in cutting edge technologies. There, holoride showed off a VR experience tailored to fit the SPEEDVEGAS track, describing their experience as “an action-packed VR deep space experience. The application gave press people and tech influencers a sneak preview on holoride’s technological prototype and turned their 50 miles per hour ride into a real wild chase.”
Fast-forward 10 months, and holoride has now partnered with Ford and Universal Pictures to offer passengers the chance to experience the Bride of Frankenstein in the seat of the new 2020 Ford Explorer. With a headset and a controller, users can encounter monsters and obstacles as they ride with Frankenstein’s bride in an immersive VR experience that is a “perfectly motion-synchronized journey through virtual worlds.”
According to Nils Wollny, the CEO of holoride and former Head of Digital Business at Audi, “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.”
If all goes well in LA, holoride could take the world of the auto passenger’s experience by storm, “turning vehicles into moving theme parks” as they continue to pursue their mission as a company that “takes everyday journeys and transforms them into hyper-immersive experiences by combining navigational and car data with XR.”
“As we’re getting to more connectivity in the vehicle, we’re interested in learning about the types of experiences that our customers are interested in…. really understanding the context of how they may want these experiences,” said Albert Choi, Ford’s partnership lead for content digital services.
