Porsche to Offer VR to Keep Backseat Passengers Occupied
Tired of bratty kids and backseat drivers getting on your nerves? Porsche might just have the solution for all your rear seat passenger woes.
Backseat Annoyances
As we all know, there's nothing worse than obnoxious backseat passengers. Whether it's some relative critiquing your driving or a bored child asking you repeatedly if you've arrived at your destination, it can really chap your hide. But now, Porsche has partnered up with the start-up tech company Holoride and the Discovery Channel to come up with a solution that might forever solve those annoying little issues.
Photos: Porsche
Virtual Reality
This partnership goes far beyond your typical pair of DVD players and small screens. In fact, it involves the use of virtual reality headsets. Passengers can choose from various two or three-dimensional experiences, ranging from documentaries and an underwater adventure to a journey through time. The VR experience transports users in a drone moving through a futuristic city.
Photos: Porsche
Killing Time
The goal of this project is to obviously explore the future of in-car entertainment. But Porsche and Holoride also want to give vehicle passengers the opportunity to immerse themselves in virtual worlds. And can you really think of a better way to kill time on a long road trip than an interactive adventure?
Photos: Porsche
Various Uses
There are many different uses for this type of tech as well. Including entertainment, edutainment, and even solutions for productivity and relaxation. Best of all, Holoride software links a VR headset with sensors and the vehicle so that content can be adapted to the car’s driving movements in real-time.
Photos: Porsche
Promising Technology
For example, as a car is being driven around a corner, the vehicle that the passenger is virtually traveling in will also change direction. Consequently, users experience a maximum immersion into a fictitious world to significantly reduce the symptoms of travel sickness. In the future, it'll even be able to evaluate navigation data in order to adapt the length of a VR experience to the calculated duration of the journey.
Photos: Porsche
Open Platform
The Discovery Channel's role in this partnership is to lend their vast experience in real-life documentary style entertainment. The media giant has also supplied its own topically matching documentary material for the in-car VR experience. Holoride is approaching this technology as an open platform, which allows all auto manufacturers and content producers to participate.
Photos: Porsche
Virtual Racing?
And this technology has many viable uses beyond just simple entertainment, too. "Our joint projects with Holoride and Porsche Digital have demonstrated what the technology is capable of. In the future we also envision Porsche-specific solutions, for instance for the race track," said Anja Mertens, Project Manager for Smart Mobility at Porsche AG.
Photos: Porsche
On the Horizon
Holoride currently plans to bring this new form of entertainment using commercially available VR headsets for passengers in the rear seats of production cars to market by 2021. So you won't have to put up with annoying backseat passengers much longer, at least.
Photos: Porsche
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