AWE 2021: Hands-on with Holoride and its automotive VR fun

Yesterday was my last day at AWE. One of the coolest things that I’ve tried has been Holoride, a system to let passengers in a car enjoy a ride in VR.

Holoride

Holoride is a very original startup in the XR ecosystem because it focuses on in-car VR entertainment. The idea is that during a trip the passengers can enjoy a VR experience that follows completely the movement of the car: if the car is going forward, you move forward at exactly its same speed inside VR, if it turns left, you turn left, and so on. If the motion of the car is synchronized with the one in the VR application, there shouldn’t be any kind of sensory mismatch, and so no motion sickness. This makes the experience much more fun and enjoyable than just playing a regular VR game or video while you are in the car.

This is amazing because it can be the entertainment of the future when cars and buses will be self-driven, and so we will need to entertain ourselves while we are on a trip. Of course, there are some safety problems to take in mind (especially what happens if the car has an accident and the people have a headset on), but the company is considering them very seriously. I think that safety-wise, we should also evaluate what can be the technological evolution of the XR headsets in the next years. Because if the headsets in 10 years will manage to become small like glasses, having an accident with them is more or less like having one today wearing standard glasses… and many people wear standard glasses in a car.

The games can react to the movements of the car because the Holoride runtime feeds them with car data. In the current situation, on a standard car already on the market, this is possible thanks to a small box part of the Holoride development kit that detects the car movements and sends them to the headset, but better integrations are planned for the future. Since the games must follow the movements of the car, which are unpredictable, the games running on Holoride must adapt to whatever movement is happening and can not rely on a predefined path. This creates new challenges for what concerns the game design. The company provides an SDK, called Elastic SDK, that offers facilities to developers to create Holoride-compatible content. Holoride is looking for interested developers, and you can register your interest here if you want.

Now that I have explained to you what is Holoride, is time to tell you about my hands-on session with it.

Hands-on with Holoride

Holoride wasn’t actually at AWE as an expositor, but the people of the company I met there, Nils Wollny (the CEO) and Christopher Bellaci have been so kind to let me try it since they discovered I am a huge fan. I was incredibly happy about that.

They invited me to their SUV car: I sat down in the backseat, and they installed the devkit next to the windshield. Then they gave me a Pico Neo 3 headset, and let me try a preliminary version of the game Cloudbreaker that Schell Games is developing for the Holoride store.

I put on the headset, and I saw myself in the clouds, with a third-person perspective of the main character. The graphics were a bit fantasy-like, cartoonish, and I was a flying character that had to collect some gems and shoot some enemy spaceships. There was an initial tutorial, that taught me the controls of the games, which basically were all about pointing with my head and shooting/grabbing with the buttons on my controllers. The pointing with the head and not with the controllers is a smart mechanic to not make the users move too much their arms, something that may distract the driver on the main seat. This shows how designing a game for Holoride means also considering that the player must be played seated, he/she has a limited action space, and he/she must not move too much to guarantee the safety of his/her, of the other passengers and to not distract the driver. These are all things to be considered in the game design stage.

When the game actually started, the car was already moving. I started shooting baddies and grabbing gems, learning how to play it pretty fast. The fact that the car was moving and I was moving in the game too felt pretty natural. The game had no predefined level, but it created its elements on the fly at a certain distance from me, to be sure that whatever was the path, there were always enemies and diamonds coming from the forward direction. If the car turned, the elements already created were abandoned, and new ones were created in front of me following the new forward direction. This is an example of how a game should be created with the Elastic SDK so that it adapts to the route of the car. The game also showed me a popup telling me the main actions that the car was performing, e.g. writing “slowing down” or “turning left”, so that I was always aware of what was happening around me and I felt safer.

I have to say that I had really fun playing it. Cloudbreaker is simple but entertaining, and I totally loved that the game felt a bit like a ride in an amusement park. The super cool thing is that your body really feels the accelerations given by the car, and it feels a bit like when you are on a rollercoaster and you feel the accelerations of the cart (of course on a car the accelerations are much more gentle), so the game has more physicality, feels really like a ride. I’ve found this incredibly entertaining. It has been for me a totally new way of enjoying a virtual reality game, with new sensations that are given by the acceleration of the vehicle. I don’t even know how to explain this, it’s something that must be tried, but it was a bit like being on a carousel. I felt again like being a kid playing in the backseat of the car while the parents are driving… I think that the 10-years old me would have loved this a lot during the long trips.

Of course, it was not all perfect. Two things in particular needs improvement in my opinion. The first one is how the game reacts during the turns of the car. Sometimes it was weird that I was grabbing some diamonds in front of me, then the car turned and I couldn’t see them anymore. I mean, it’s weird that you don’t have agency on the movements of the character and sometimes it feels unfair that you are close to performing some action (e.g. grabbing a bonus in front of you), then the car turns left or right and you can not do that anymore. Then there is the motion sickness: in my personal experience, the claim of not having motion sickness didn’t work completely, and the game actually made me feel some weird sensations while the car was turning or decelerating. It was not the classical motion sickness I have in VR when I move with smooth locomotion, it was a different sensation, of my body feeling dizzy, feeling unsafe when there were these changes in velocity. It was similar to the sensation of losing balance. It was not so bad to make me wanting to stop playing the game, but it was anyway there, and I think this is a problem that should be solved before the system goes live on the market. I’ve talked about this with the Holoride people and they say that usually this doesn’t happen, and it may be because for the demo with me they just used the devkit and not a full integration of the Holoride system with the car… or I am just sensible to some kind of movements. They were actually quite surprised, as it happens only to a very limited number of people that play with Holoride, and I was the only one at AWE with that side effect. Anyway, they told me they are working on improving the experience also for the people like me.

I kept playing the game and I could have gone on for a lot more, but at a certain point, the demo time ended and I had to remove the headset. I really loved Cloudbreaker on Holoride, it was really fun, one of my best experiences at AWE. I think that I would have even paid some money (not much, we VR people are always poor) to play it because it totally felt like a ride in an amusement park thanks to the physical accelerations provided by the car. After my hands-on with Holoride, I see the potential this system has. Of course, there are problems to solve, like the one about safety, and of course, it has to be evaluated if this fun factor keeps being high even if you use the system every day or if it was just a novelty effect for me, but I am sure this is a very interesting solution.

I hope you enjoyed this review, and if it is the case, subscribe to my newsletter to not miss my next articles where I will tell you my hands-on experiences with cool hardware like Mojo Vision AR lenses, Lynx, and more from AWE 2021!

UPDATE (2021.11.12): I have added some sentences giving more context about the sickness