German start-up Holoride has designed a virtual-reality experience for the backseats of taxis, for passengers in autonomous vehicles or for kids on long car trips.
Holoride's games and visualisations provide entertainment that's specifically tailored to passengers, incorporating the car's real-time movements, such as acceleration and steering.
The resulting experiences are not only immersive, they help to combat motion sickness by syncing what the passenger sees with what they feel.
"People often can't enjoy transit time, because watching a movie or reading makes them feel uncomfortable," said Holoride. "Time is a precious thing, but most of it feels wasted when you are on the road."
"We believe that a precious thing should be enjoyed. No matter how far you go, a ride should make you happy, maybe even smarter or more productive." Holoride's mixed-reality visualisations incorporate the vehicle's real-time movements
Holoride is part of a subset of VR known as mixed-reality, or XR, because it mixes the virtual and real worlds, without entering the terrain of augmented reality.
A video promoting the concept shows the user slipping on a headset to access experiences including driving the streets of a brightly coloured cartoon city, soaring through a Jurassic landscape as a pterodactyl and shooting missiles from a careening space fighter.
When the car stops at a pedestrian crossing in real life, the passenger, in VR, gets to play a whack-a-mole-type...