Holoride GmbH, a company that provides virtual reality entertainment experiences to back-seat passengers during car rides, today announced a $12 million funding round led by Terranet AB.

The company provides an entertainment technology that syncs its entertainment to the movement of the car that the passenger is in. That means when the car moves, so does the scenery in the game or environment that the user is seeing in the virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed-reality device.

Holoride intends to use this Series A funding to expand its current talent pool of content creators and prepare for its market launch next year.

Most importantly, this funding represents a partnership with Terranet, which is a developer of advanced driver-assistance software that accesses intelligent sensor technology. By processing motion and location-based data in real time, Holoride can create highly immersive content that will adjust to travel with the time and route of the ride the passenger is on and thus stay in sync with that journey.

That’s important because when wearing a VR device there are concerns such as vertigo and nausea because VR and XR devices occlude vision. Any motion of the vehicle that does not sync correctly with what’s happening in the VR simulation would create motion sickness.

An example of play could be a back-seat passenger dons a VR headset for a trip across the city and discovers themselves in a carriage ride across an idyllic countryside. They are beset by bandits and must repel them with arrows using a handheld controller to aim and fire a bow at them. When the driver accelerates and decelerates due to traffic the terrain and bandits would speed and slow with the vehicle.

Furthermore, when the Terranet sensors detect the car slowing because the brakes were being applied for a stoplight, the application would also slow down the simulation and bring it to a halt – and perhaps the bandits would react appropriately, as would the environment by displaying a crossroads. All that could be scripted by content creators to create more immersive content based on greater access to data from the car ride.

“Integrating Terranet’s capabilities to generate a low latency view of the world into our tech stack can significantly enhance the Holoride experience and become our next leap forward in changing in-vehicle experiences for good,” said Nils Wollny, co-founder and chief executive of Holoride.

As part of this investment, Terranet will give Holoride access to VoxelFlow technology, which was originally designed to address safety concerns for vehicles, but will now be expanded to enhance in-car XR experiences. This is the sensors and real-time location, acceleration and reaction data collected by Terranet now fed to Holoride to enhance the entertainment experiences.

“This collaboration enables Terranet to expand our addressable market while also getting access to the leading automotive manufacturers that will be using Holoride,” said Pär-Olof Johannesson, chief executive of Terranet. “Combining our ultrafast 3D sensor technology with Holoride’s gaming and XR experiences will revolutionize the everyday car trip, providing more meaningful experiences for passengers.”

Image: Holoride