3D VR is coming to a back seat near you
Audi and Disney’s new Avengers: Rocket’s Rescue Run may be the cure for motion sickness
Fifty million people take a trip in one of four ride-hailing platforms each and every day.”
Nils Wollny
ULAS VEGAS ber has a problem. Millennials, its prime clientele, are bored. I really don’t know what the problem is; I am, after all, a pathetic old Boomer. Maybe there’s a schism in the Marvel/DC Comics continuum. Fortnite’s server could be down. And, of course, hell hath no fury like a hipster with a dead iPhone. Whatever. All I know is there seems to be a pandemic of Millennial ennui.
I know this because Nils Wollny told me so.
“Fifty million people take a trip in one of four ride-hailing platforms each and every day,” and, says the head of Audi’s Digital Business unit, they’re bored to death.
Now, we could stop here to make some snarky social commentary that perhaps a little boredom might do our overly distracted youngsters some good. Or that being continuously and completely absorbed in a digital playground might just be one of the reasons Millennials claim to be so stressed.
But we’re not going to do that. Nope, what we’re going to do instead is tell you what a bloody marvel this new technology is, and that soon — as in, by the end of 2020 — you’re going to be able to buy, for relative peanuts, an entertainment system so utterly phantasmagorical that “Are we there yet?” is going to be replaced with “Are we there already?”
It’s called Holoride, and it’s the product of the continuing alliance between Audi and Disney — a co-operation that began with the famous pairing of R8 and Iron Man — that combines 3D virtual reality with real-world driving.
Now VR, in and of itself, is hardly new. Even I know what Nintendo Virtual Boy is and PlayStation 4 VR is as common as dirt. What sets Holoride apart — besides the fact that the graphics and motion tracking are Disney quality — is that the car and the holographic experience are one. Essentially everything the car does, so do the characters — in my case, Rocket, a Guardians of the Galaxy character who will appear in Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
If the car you’re strapped into — say, a completely silent e-Tron whose eerie silence maximizes Holoride’s theatric sound effects — takes a sharp turn to the left, so does the spaceship you’re chasing. If the driver of said e-tron decides to make use of all of its prodigious 490 pound-feet of torque, your spaceship is going to rocket ahead at Warp Factor Eight.
Everything that happens to the car in the real world happens in your virtual world so that physical sensation matches the graphics absolutely perfectly. Think of it as the world’s most sophisticated simulator, only you’re on the way to the gym.
The mechanics — or, at least, the concept of the mechanics — are fairly simple. The car is already feeding information back to its various safety systems — ABS, vehicle stability control, etc. — in real time. The car, for instance, already knows how fast it’s turning (by measuring yaw for the VSC system), how hard it’s braking (the ABS’s deceleration sensor) or how quickly it’s accelerating (the traction control’s speed sensor), so it’s just a matter of piping that information to the headset so the Disney Games and Interactive Experience folk can synchronize Rocket’s twists and turns with your own. (Right now, Holoride’s headsets have to be tethered directly the car’s ECU, but by the time Holoride is ready for prime time, Wollny promises that users will enjoy the even greater freedom of wireless connectivity).
I’ve got to say, I’m a huge fan already. I’m not much of a gamer (I had to ask what Fortnite was) but I had an absolute hoot blasting bad bots out of the sky while the e-tron chased around the Speed Vegas track. Like the most modern interactive games, simply looking at the Dastardly Do-Wrong you want to blast out of the sky is enough to aim your missile, with a small controller to shoot, and the tracking is so consistently accurate that it feels real.
More importantly, Holoride’s movements feel real — duh, because they are — and not digitized fakery. Yes, folks, the best gaming seat on the planet is in the back seat of an Audi.
Now here’s the kicker: It’s actually good for you. One of the byproducts of this realtime interaction — and the real-time feedback it generates — is that it actually helps reduce motion sickness. Not just compared to other games, reading or doing a crossword puzzle (which typically cause car-borne stomach disorientation), but even compared with paying attention to the road, pretending to steer a wheel and all the other things sufferers do to try to relieve their gastronomical stress.
Wollny says Holoride’s combination of incredible peripheral view and its realtime feedback, along with the distraction of playing a game, results in almost two-thirds fewer cases of motion sickness when taking the controls of Rocket’s ship.
Of course, there’s going to be more to this in-car virtual reality shtick than just Marvel’s little rocketeer. Indeed, Wollny sees Holoride as more of an incubator for independent gamers. Audi will have the “kit” coders require to produce more games by the end of this year and in-car games should be ready in the spring of 2020.
In fact, Wollny believes so strongly in Holoride’s formula that he’ll soon be leaving Audi to become the chief executive officer of the new 3D spinoff. It’s not hard to imagine why. A video game that distracts the young ‘uns and is healthy to boot? If that’s not a licence to print money, I don’t know what is!