holoride goes Hollywood

Teaming up with Universal Pictures and Ford for the world’s first in-car VR experience open to the general public at Universal CityWalk of Hollywood.

Lined up for the world's first holoriders
Lined up for the world's first holoriders

While making strides in edutainment with Porsche and Discovery Channel, we’ve also been working on new adventures for even more holoriders to enjoy, and we’re happy to unveil our latest endeavor.

Joining forces with Universal Pictures and Ford for the world’s first in-car VR experience open to the general public

We’ve teamed holoride technology and the latest 2020 Ford Explorer vehicles to plunge riders into the mysterious world of the Bride of Frankenstein. The event, to be held at Universal CityWalk of Hollywood, gives people onsite the chance to become holoriders. This first public holoride experience will be offered at a massive scale to a broad public audience from Oct. 14 until November 9 – just in time for Halloween.

"We are partnering with Ford and Universal to bring holoride’s immersive Elastic Content to the general public,” said Nils Wollny, CEO and co-founder of holoride. Nils added:

Riders will be able to experience first-hand what the future of in-vehicle entertainment looks like through the lens of the compelling story of the Bride of Frankenstein.

Re-imagining Frankenstein and his Bride
Hello, darkness! A creepy monster from our latest experience
Hello, darkness! A creepy monster from our latest experience

Riders will step inside a 2020 Ford Explorer from the designated pickup location at Universal CityWalk during the ride’s hours of operation. Once inside the vehicles, riders buckle their seatbelts, put on their VR headset, and are joined by a re-imagined, virtual Bride on a journey to deliver a message to Frankenstein.

Along the way, riders will encounter virtual monsters and obstacles in a fully immersive, virtual reality experience complete with sound effects and visuals that adapt to the movement of the car. This breathtaking content was created by Universal Monsters in collaboration with immersive specialist, REWIND - one of our first selected production studios working with our SDK.

Innovating the way forward

This holoride experience was the first to be built implementing altitude data, leveraging the power of the third dimension. It is also the first proof-of-concept of holoride’s software development kit working perfectly with the Unreal game engine. This again illustrates holoride’s dedication to innovating across all platforms and being open for all car and content manufacturers.

Greg Reed, Vice President, Universal Pictures Technology Partnerships said:

This partnership with holoride and Ford highlights NBCUniversal’s ongoing commitment to collaborate with the most innovative technology companies and consumer brands to create unique and forward-thinking immersive experiences for our audiences.

"As we’re getting to more connectivity in the vehicle, we’re interested in learning about the types of experiences that our customers are interested in…. really understanding the context of how they may want these experiences,” adds Albert Choi, Ford’s partnership lead for content digital services.

About holoride

German startup holoride creates an entirely new media category for passengers by connecting Extended Reality (XR) content with data points from the vehicle in real time. These data points include physical feedback, like acceleration and steering, traffic data, as well as travel route and time. holoride technology provides a new type of immersion into any kind of VR content, creating a breathtaking, immersive experience, and significantly reducing motion sickness. The tech startup was founded at the end of 2018 in Munich, Germany by Nils Wollny, Marcus Kuehne, Daniel Profendiner, and Audi, who holds a minority stake in the startup. It was hailed “Best of CES” four times (Las Vegas, January 2019), recognized as one of the 100 Best Inventions of 2019 by TIME Magazine and is part of the global innovation platform “STARTUP AUTOBAHN powered by Plug and Play.” In 2021, holoride went on to win the prestigious SXSW Pitch and was also named Best in Show.