Porsche partners with Swiss startup

Startup Autobahn is Europe's largest innovation platform powered by Plug and Play that brings together leading industry players with startups to form partnerships and launch new solutions. In the past four years, the Startup Autobahn has worked with 220 startups on 320 pilot projects and 60 of them have been successfully implemented.

The seventh edition builds on this success announcing 40 new pilot projects launched by 27 startups and 29 international partners including Daimler and Porsche from Germany, DXC Technology from the USA, Motherson from India, or Yanfeng Automotive Interiors from China.

The Zurich-based startup Way Ahead Technologies, founded in October 2019, won a pilot project with Porsche. Way Ahead tracks, maps and visualizes real driving live and in 3D with the help of a 2D camera to make incredible and sophisticated augmented reality features for head-up displays and virtual cockpits possible and enhance the driving experience. The technology can also transform the driving data into a 3D environment and generate a highly accurate replay for interactive analyzing, comparing and stunning experiences.

As revealed by Porsche, Way Ahead’s technology was implemented in two steps into a Porsche 911. In the first stage, the technology was integrated into the vehicle with a mobile device. In a second stage, Porsche's engineers and Way Ahead integrated the technology into a Porsche 991 AR-HUD prototype. Different Use Cases are possible, for example in the safety area, future vehicles could use the data for predictive navigation, danger spots, lane guidance. A second use case is gaming whereby a player could use the technology to virtually drive against real driving data.

(Press release/ran)