HTC says it’s fairly positive a brand new car-based digital actuality expertise it’s engaged on received’t depart you and your automobile smothered in vomit.

In a weblog post, the corporate introduced it was partnering up with in-vehicle VR expertise maker Holoride to create digital curler coasters and different digital worlds for HTC’s transportable Vive Flow that may be skilled as a automobile passenger. HTC says Holoride matches its digital experiences with the real-time movement, location, and navigational information from a automobile which implies the video games ought to change and adapt relying on the automobile’s motion. The headset maker intends to point out off the expertise to a choose variety of friends attending subsequent week’s MWC 2022 occasion in Barcelona and plans to launch commercially someday through the second half of 2022.

This isn’t Holoride’s first try at car-based VR experiences. Last yr, they really showcased some footage from a sport known as Cloudbreaker that was made in partnership with developer Schell Games which reveals a number of the methods the world adjustments based mostly on a automobile’s motion.

If you’re like this author, doing absolutely anything in a automobile aside from driving can shortly flip right into a movement sickness-induced messy scenario.

According to a 2019 analysis paper, as many as 46% of automobile passengers surveyed within the U.S., Brazil, China, Germany, and the UK mentioned they’ve skilled automobile illness previously 5 years. Another examine published final yr within the journal Scientific Reports, in the meantime, claims wherever between 22% and 80% of VR customers skilled some type of “cybersickness” a movement sickness-like concern that may contain “fullness of stomach, disorientation, vertigo, ataxia, nausea, and vomiting.” Logically, you’d suppose combining these two probably puke-inducing actions collectively would spell catastrophe, however on this case, HTC and Holoride say two negatives actually do equal a optimistic.

Holoride claims it has extraordinarily low latency ranges, that means its digital expertise can match the actions of a automobile nearly completely. In principle, the corporate says that synchronicity ought to get rid of most instances of automobile nausea. “By matching what you see and what you feel with almost no latency, Holoride is able to reduce motion sickness,” Holoride says. “More euphoria, less nausea.”

That sounds fairly good! Whether upcoming car-cased VR experiences truly work in apply although—notably among the many subset of VR customers who are likely to expertise movement illness even outdoors of automobiles—stays to be seen. Gizmodo is reaching out to see if we will get our arms on the system to check it ourselves. We’ll attempt to report again on this author’s vomit standing.

Strapping a VR headset in your child’s head to get them to cease annoying you throughout an extended drive may appear to be a considerably restricted use case, nevertheless it tugs at a much bigger concern: how will technologists and society stop puke-crammed driverless vehicles?

One of the good guarantees of the autonomous automobile period concerned rising applied sciences vanquishing the numbness of each day commutes, affording riders extra time to make amends for work, watch a film, or do anything they’d on some other display. That techno-utopian imaginative and prescient begins sounding rather a lot much less interesting although if watching the newest Netflix present in your autonomous Tesla induces gut-churning nausea. Fortunately, researchers on the University of Michigan and elsewhere are investigating methods to resolve this drawback, nevertheless it doesn’t appear simple.

In the meantime, nothing is stopping anybody from utilizing VR headsets within the backseat of a automobile. If you do go that route although, perhaps contemplate doing so on an empty abdomen for now.