Welcome to the motor verse

From the outside, there's not much to suggest that a part of the digital revolution is being conceived and designed in this functional-looking office building in a suburb. But the building houses the offical HQ of holoride and inside around 60 ‘holoriders’ are working on implementing immersive entertainment in vehicles. This is where Nils Wollny, one of the founders, has his office, although he doesn’t spend much time there. 

The 40-year-old is on the road a lot be it around the globe or between desks and computers talking to his colleagues. He often wears virtual reality goggles to immerse himself in the world he and his team want to make accessible to passengers in vehicles. 

"Studies show that people around the world collectively spend about 400 billion hours in cars. If just a fraction of that time could be put to good use with our services, a lot could be achieved," he says, offering insight into part of the company's mission.

In certain Audi models and markets, backseat passengers will soon be able to immerse themselves literally in movies, video games and interactive content with the help of VR goggles using the holoride system. To engage the senses so intensively that the virtual world is perceived as real, holoride is connected to the vehicle system to access the motion data to incorporate acceleration, changes of direction and braking behaviour. They call it ‘elastic content’ and the  fact that Audi plays a decisive role has something to do with Nils Wollny's past.

The holoride story essentially begins in the early 2000s. “Cars and entertainment," Wollny says looking back, "have always fascinated and driven me." Back then, he wrote his dissertation for and at Audi. "I gave it the title Metrotainment – essentially entertainment in metropolises. It was about interactive experience formats in urban spaces and the question of how to stage a brand like Audi in this context." 

Before that, he spent about a year in Los Angeles as an intern at Audi. Since then, Audi and Nils Wollny's professional paths have crossed time and again. After graduating, Wollny initially went to work in an agency in Hamburg, but then in 2015 he moved to Ingolstadt as Head of Digital Business.

Wollny then met with Daniel Profendiner and Markus Kühne, both of whom were on a different approach to essentially the same subject, and the combination of the different approaches produced a workable solution.

"The three of us then started to build a prototype,” Wollny says, but back then in 2016, the necessary equipment was big enough to fill the boot of the car. Initially, there was a lack of computer power, the synchronisation between the car's movements and the virtual reality experience was not perfect and the VR goggles were still a long way from where they are today.

Today, the holoride system consists of the VR goggles and a controller connected via Bluetooth.

It quickly becomes clear that a technology like holoride could turn a vehicle into a new space for entertainment. Just as quickly, it becomes evident that from a media group’s perspective, "holoride would have to be conceived openly for all manufacturers in order to be truly successful and designed in the best sense for consumers," Wollny explains. 

So in 2018 Wollny, Kühne, Profendiner and Audi founded holoride GmbH as an open technology start-up. 

"I'm still very grateful because I think it's quite unusual for an automaker to let go and accept that it makes more sense to have a smaller part of something big than a big part of something small." At CES 2019 in Las Vegas, they gave the first major presentation to a wide audience and since then, the system has been employed increasingly, amongst other things, providing a completely new experience for visitors to the Salzburg Festival amongst other things.

Holoride’s plans are certainly big. 'Adding thrill to every ride’ is the company's mission, with the emphasis well and truly on every ride. It’s a universe that potentially has no end and will change the way passengers spend their time in a vehicle. For passengers, a short trip to the shops or across town could well become an intergalactic journey or a literal mission to the unknown – the very nature of in-car entertainment has changed forever.

At time of writing no decision had yet been made on Australian introduction of holoride systems.