For years I’ve heard whispers about virtual reality inside of self-driving cars, supposedly incubated as quiet projects inside of secretive companies. Variety just delivered a small scoop in that vein, by digging up a couple of Apple patent applications related to virtual reality inside of self-driving cars.

Variety quotes from one of the patent applications:

“For example, a virtual representation of an author or talk show host may appear to be sitting in the seat next to the passenger; the virtual author may be reading one of their books to the passenger, or the virtual talk show host may be hosting their show from the seat next to the passenger, with their voices provided through the audio system. As another example, the passenger may experience riding on a flatbed truck with a band playing a gig on the flatbed, with the band’s music provide (sic) through the audio system.”

An extra wrinkle in the article is that the name on a couple of these patent applications is Mark Rober. Rober was previously unknown to me, but he has a YouTube channel with 3.5 million subscribers and videos like Lemon Powered Supercar, and World’s LARGEST NERF GUN.

Regardless of the patents’ author, a more prosaic description comes in the first sentence of one of the patent summaries:

“A VR system for vehicles that may implement methods that address problems with vehicles in motion that may result in motion sickness for passengers.”

I’ve written in the past about my difficulty doing serious cognitive work in a moving vehicle, even though I’m not driving. There are many ways to address this: improve the quality of roads, improve the quality of motion control through vehicular software, better mechanical suspension systems, possibly flying cars, and of course virtual reality.

Of these options, virtual reality seems less likely to me, because my impression is that virtual reality tends to induce motion sickness even in stationary situations. There is an argument presented in the patent that a moving vehicle in some ways mitigates the motion sickness problem, but my intuition is that this seems unlikely.

I would be excited to be proven wrong, though, and would love to try it out.

Grocery delivery seems like one of the obvious applications of self-driving vehicles, but I wouldn’t have guessed that Kroger would be out front on it.

“To start out, Nuro will use a fleet of self-driving test vehicles with human safety drivers to make deliveries for Kroger’s grocery stores. Customers can track and interact with the vehicles via a Nuro app or Kroger’s pre-existing online delivery platform. But if Nuro’s human test drivers don’t get out to help you, don’t be mad because in our driverless future, we all need to pitch in and unload our own groceries.”

I think the tipping point with autonomous vehicles will be when boring, non-tech businesses like groceries can put them to work without having develop their own fleet. So far, most self-driving car companies have either been in the mobility space to begin with, or had to dive into the mobility space as part of developing that business line.

If Kroger can utilize self-driving cars as a service, without having to build self-driving cars themselves, that would be a big step forward.

Our friends and former Udacity colleagues at Voyage just announced the addition of Drew Gray as their CTO. Drew is one of the key contributors to building the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, and has taught both our students and myself so much. Any company would be lucky to have Drew, so this is a huge hire for Voyage.

In just a few years, the self-driving car industry has seen so much movement, and in many ways it still feels like a small community that is poised for tremendous growth.

At Udacity, we are fortunate to be right in the middle of this. We met Drew right after he’d joined Otto from Cruise, and then worked with him at Uber and now Voyage. Our partners at NVIDIA and Mercedes-Benz have hired many of our graduates, and we see them regularly at conferences and industry events.

Udacity students work at every company I can think of the in the autonomous vehicle industry, from manufacturers like BMW and Ford to suppliers like Bosch to ride-sharing companies like Lyft to startups like Parkopedia and Phantom Auto.

It’s a lot of fun to be part of this community and grow with it.

A couple of miles from downtown Detroit, in the Corktown neighborhood, stands Michigan Central Station. At 18 stories, it is a grand building that has been vacant and deteriorating for decades.

Ford Motor Company just announced that they have purchased the building and surrounding land, with plans to turn it into a campus for their autonomous vehicle and mobility teams.

The plans call for all of this work to complete by 2022, so it will be a while coming, but the vision is big and I’m looking forward to seeing it unfold.

As a Virginian, I love Torc Robotics. The idea that there is a top-notch self-driving car company operating out of Blacksburg, Virginia, of all places, is an inspiration.

Check out the latest video of their Asimov system performing urban autonomous driving.

https://youtu.be/dXTtDiWehRY