Deciding on which car to buy is a major decision, which can affect the next several years of your life.
Volvo wants you to be fully immersed in that decision. That's precisely why the automaker has teamed up with Microsoft HoloLens to put a spotlight on its lineup of cars like never before, allowing customers to get an in-depth view in mixed reality via a high-definition hologram.
"You can do something you could never do before ... you can see the soul of the car," says Aric Dromi, Volvo's chief futurologist, in a video clip explaining the automaker's collaboration with HoloLens. "You can strip the body out and stare at the skeleton."
By putting on a HoloLens headset, customers can be immersed into the car-buying experience, able to inspect the engine, chassis or watch the vehicle in action. Taking the customizing of a vehicle online a step further, the collaboration between Volvo and HoloLens will also allow drivers to view a full scale model of the car they build in mixed reality as a high-definition hologram.
"With HoloLens we have the freedom to create a bespoke experience which customers can steer themselves. Imagine using mixed reality to choose the type of car you want — to explore the colors, rims, or get a better understanding of the features, services and options available," Björn Annwall, Volvo's senior vice president of marketing sales and service, said in a Microsoft press release statement.
Although the clip is pretty cool to see, there's no official word on when Volvo might bring this technology into the fold, other than showing it's potential here.
Given Volvo's rich history in safety, it's great that drivers could think of the automaker in a new light via its usage of the HoloLens and mixed reality.
