Nils Wollny is the CEO and co-founder of Holoride

These are liveblogged notes from Nils’ talk to NEXT Limited Edition in Hamburg on 24th September 2021.

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What is the Holoride experience? It’s inherently a Metaverse experience. The Metaverse is, at its best, the physical world and the digital world colliding, and creating a supernova. 

Holoride’s supernova is transforming the in-car experience.

How do people spend time in cars as passengers? Not the drivers, be it human or autonomous cars, because they’re busy doing other things. Now, what about the passengers? There’s a huge passenger economy already, and we don’t give much thought to that experience. Can we create something new and compelling there?

Teenagers are the most intrigued by the Metaverse, and they’re often the (reluctant) passengers. They don’t think about screens, they think about spatial computing. They think about the Metaverse. 

Driving through the Metaverse

So, how can we connect this with the physical space they’re passing through? The team have been thinking about this since 2015. In the early days, they experimented with bringing games into the car, with the motion of the car synchronised with the virtual experience. 

By 2018, those early prototypes persuaded Audi to spin this business out as a start-up, with Audi as a minority shareholder. Holoride is now building immersive Metaverse experiences for passengers to be installed in any car whose manufacturer is interested in the idea.

The Holoride SDK is a plugin for standard games engines like Unity. They’re hoping to have it installed in commercially available cars by next summer — but physical NEXT Conference attendees could experience a playable demo of the Holoride outside the conference venue.

The Metaverse is about to get mobile.