Road trip revolution: Holoride focuses on fun

In the near future, getting there might really be half the fun.

Holoride, a Munich in-vehicle tech and entertainment startup, has pioneered a virtual reality-based platform that's designed to bring unique content to teenagers and other young-at-heart riders in the car.

No more utilitarian travel between point A and point B. Holoride intends to turn car rides into something resembling a theme park experience, and it is working with carmakers, gaming companies and movie studios to make it happen.

Holoride is launching its first product with Audi, from which it spun off, in certain 2023 vehicles in mid-November. It is expected to reach the U.S. next year.

Holoride melds real-time vehicle data on speed, motion and whereabouts into the virtual experience, forming a new type of content and differentiating the company from other efforts in the in-vehicle entertainment space.

Nils Wollny, 41, CEO of Holoride, co-founded the company in 2018. He checked in with News Editor Pete Bigelow following Holoride's product reveal this month. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: When you started working on this in 2015, when it was being incubated at Audi, what did you see on the horizon? What sort of reception did you get?

A: When we started the journey, I am pretty sure not everybody was thinking this was a good idea.

More like it was a crazy idea. People were not really familiar with virtual reality and not aware of the concept that content can be motion- and location-aware. Now with the metaverse taking shape, suddenly we've received a lot of momentum.

Did you look at this with the assumption that self-driving cars were near and that everyone would be a rider?

I was looking into the autonomous age and wondering, "How will people spend time in cars and in which situations?" If you think of media consumption, it's obviously a big topic, and there's not a lot of real contribution to the experience from car companies. But if you consider the car as a spatial device that is very receptive for things happening around it, then we started asking, "Can we use this and pair it with something else, all the immersive computing technology?"

Does this change the dynamic in which car companies don't have much control over in-car entertainment?

People carry their personal devices with them, but maybe car manufacturers should extend the car to the personal device inside of always trying to squeeze the smartphone to the center screen and mimicking what people already have with them. We've created something unique, and it captures some of the value that's being created. That's our business model.

What was behind the decision to make Holoride an independent company?

We were showing it to movie studios and gaming companies, and they were all excited by the concept. They planted the seed.

They said, "It's great that Audi is doing this and experimenting, but how does it scale beyond a few models or brands?

"How does this become an interesting audience for us?" So for the benefit of the industry, we spun it out into a space that turns the car into one of the most exciting places for content consumption.

How does it work? What data is Holoride collecting?

All manufacturers need to provide certain data points like acceleration, braking, steering angle, GPS position.

What a car manufacturer needs to do is provide these data points via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in the interior of the car, and our application gets permission and can read and interpret it in real time.

You started looking at this in terms of autonomous cars. In a human-driver world, is this a small market?

Not at all, to be honest. Everybody talks about the passenger economy that will rise when autonomous cars are here, but teenagers are being driven around today. The passenger economy is already here, but nobody caters to them.

The whole auto industry is still focused on car buyers and drivers and not on the rider or passenger. This is a super interesting target group for the media industry because there is no competition. At home, I have a PlayStation and Netflix offerings, and I have to do homework, and there's all these things that want my attention. In the car, it's a pretty unique space where this competition is still somewhat small. And when you think of the car as a perfect spatial device, this content can be super unique to the car.

What does this all look like to you by, say, 2030?

We will see a lot more cars with something we call the immersive cabin, so it's not just reflecting and taking in data, but adaptive. It can interpret things and build more intense surroundings and applications. Think of an experience that corresponds with the content being consumed. Imagine your seat starts rattling or the scent in the cabin matches what you are experiencing. And if I go really wild, people are getting into cars to experience something, not just to get primarily from A to B. They don't physically need to be somewhere, but the car is a mobile theme park. This is the very first thought I had. This is an experience. Hopefully, by that time, travel is carbon neutral.