Meta Platforms wants to make car rides more productive, fun, and enjoyable for riders. To this end, the American digital company has teamed up with the Munich-based carmakers BMW to bring its technologies for virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR, AR, XR) to the road.
Gregor Brunner
Editor in business.
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In a research partnership, the two companies are testing how Meta's glasses behave in fast-moving cars. When the wearer is at a standstill or moving slowly, the sensors of the glasses can accurately record their surroundings and display virtual objects and data in the room in a stable manner for the wearer. The rapid movement of a car and the passing objects outside the vehicle while a passenger is sitting still has been one of the biggest hurdles to using XR technology in cars so far.
This hurdle has now been overcome, as Meta and BMW wrote in a jointly published statement on Wednesday. The glasses can read out the information from the sensors installed in the cars and thus precisely determine the position of the passenger in the car as well as in the moving environment.
Claus Dorrer, head of BMW's technology office in the United States, anticipated expectations of an imminent release: "It is too early to say how or when exactly this technology will get into the hands of users." But one can imagine different use cases for passengers and drivers. Companies are thinking, for example, of determining the location of the vehicle in blind parking spaces or warnings of possible dangers while driving. Applications for entertainment, productivity and meditation are also already being planned.
The announcement was flanked by a post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social network Instagram. In the video of the article, Zuckerberg himself is shown with the VR glasses Quest 2. Another unknown user is trying out various applications in a car with the more powerful Quest Pro glasses. You can see virtual notes hanging from the window panes, a small airplane flying past thunderclouds outside, and a conversation with an avatar from the "Horizon Worlds" conference software.