Gamechanger: VividQ reveals its one-of-a-kind holographic tech for bike shops
An often overused phrase, gamechanger might actually be the most accurate description for VividQ’s holographic offering, which significantly expands the ways that bike dealers can operate, sell products and even run events. CIN speaks with CEO and Co-Founder Darran Milne about this brand new cutting-edge technology…
Picture the scene: You’ve a customer in your bike shop on the verge of a sale. They need a large frame, but you’ve only a small size one on the shop floor and they’re concerned about how the large will look in reality. They also want to see what it would look like in a different colour, but it’s not one you’ve got in stock. And how would it look with that new saddle from their favourite brand, they wonder?
No bike shop can stock all the sizes, colours and iterations a customer may want and this can lead to a frustrating experience and – worst case – maybe a missed sale for a shop, or a disgruntled customer when they finally get their hands on their bike.
“Even in a Porsche car showroom, it’s not often you get to see the exact car that you’re buying until you pick it up”
This is not a problem confined to the bike trade. You want to see what that £2,000-plus sofa looks like in sage green before you part with your cash? Well, you’re going to have to make do with thumbing through a dog-eared book of samples.
“Even in a Porsche car showroom, it’s not often you get to see the exact car that you’re buying until you pick it up,” notes Darran Milne, Co-Founder and CEO of VividQ. It’s an odd situation, where bigger purchases are often made partly on blind faith. Inevitably – when money is paid or the contract is signed, and the consumer finally gets to see it in the flesh – there’s a degree of trepidation about the gap between expectation and reality. This slightly strange retail reality is something that VividQ has developed a compelling alternative for.
If the idea of your shop having accurate 3D holograms of 1,000s of bikes, that a customer can select and walk around while closely examining, seems like science fiction then that’s because it has been until this ground breaking development from VividQ.
It definitely beats being hunched over a screen squinting at a bike in a colour you actually want
CIN has been keen to see this retail relevant hologram tech in the flesh, and was lucky enough to get an invite from VividQ to step into a darkened room in an office in Cambridge, where we stand with a lightweight pair of glasses, while a staffer fires up the software. This is a hot off the press rudimentary version of the set-up VividQ has been developing. Before long, a 3D image of a handbag is in the middle of the room. You can step around it, look under it and get an experience very similar to if it was in the room with you, other than maybe smelling it (maybe that’s next?). Then we switch to the main event and the handbag is replaced with a road bike. Full size in the room (yet not in the room), you can walk around it, get up close to examine whichever bit you want and see it in full depth. In a moment, the road bike is replaced by a folding bike. Want to see it folded? Here it is. In another colour…?
It’s probably the most futuristic thing CIN has seen in the trade, and it’s here with us in 2026. And it definitely beats being hunched over a screen squinting at a bike.
Fans in Silicon Valley
VividQ is a company staffed by those at the cutting edge of technology. And this really is the bleeding edge of tech – the kind of project that great engineering minds at Meta, Google and a number of other big international players are also working hard to crack, whether for heads up displays in car or to revolutionise entertainment. Indeed, VividQ has attracted fans over in Silicon Valley and also a bunch of investors.
It’s not hard to see why. Channelling over 20 years of research, the business has over 50 patents. Led by an academic team (the proximity to Cambridge provides a clue where they got started), VividQ is definitely not just about the hardware: “We use standard components off the shelf,” explains Darran, adding that much of the magic comes from the software.
The idea of holographic display has been with us for decades now. Apparently Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor was the first to establish holographic projection principles, back in the 1940s (before lasers). Since then, we’ve seen them in film – like Princess Leia telling Obi Wan Kenobi to get a move on, in Star Wars – and on stage extracting vast amounts of cash with holograms of ABBA entertaining thousands (though these are not – academically speaking – holograms, we learn). You may be familiar with Star Trek’s Holodeck, where characters step into a blank room that swiftly becomes a photo realistic hologram you can step around and interact with – this is a more helpful example of what VividQ tech is aiming for.
While film makers have been tricking us for years, it’s enormously difficult to make true holograms, with accurate depth, appearing in mid-air which you can walk around, happen in the real world. It’s a task that has beaten engineers around the world for decades.
VividQ’s longer term plan to produce a room-sized hologram is about 12 months away, the firm believes, and it has a 25 m² plot in Hemel Hempstead where it’s putting together a demonstration area.
What VividQ has to offer here and now, is actually an interim solution on the road to its room-sized ambitions. When it showed what it has to investors, they were suitably impressed and urged the firm to take it to market now.
A premium experience for bike dealers
The technology is tantalising and likely to be useful to bike dealers that want to offer a premium experience, where customers can walk around their potential purchases without meaning shops have to tie up lots of cash on their shelves. We’re told that there is distributor-level interest too.
VividQ’s holographic displays open up the possibilities. For a travel agent, they can show how a resort or hotel looks beyond a screen. An estate agent could take you on a house tour without leaving the office. Bike shops could run evening events where a pro cyclist answers questions, appearing as a hologram. Maybe even a turbo trainer session that brings a route from the Dolomites to a bike shop on a rainy Tuesday evening in Grimsby… In fact, using this tech, a bike shop’s floor space could feasibly be greatly reduced to not much more than the space of a bike. The odds of a hologram bike getting nicked from your store reduces too.
There are VividQ pilots currently operating in bike shops in Cambridge now and if you’re heading to CIN Live 2026, you’ll have chance to try the technology yourself (to be fair, this is probably one of the occasions where seeing it with your own eyes will be more useful than reading about it).
VividQ is looking for AV installers to partner with, stressing that the hardware is akin to the kind of thing you might in a living room home entertainment set up. The pragmatic firm is working with existing hardware companies (“we now work with very big OEMs”) and for bike shops, the cost beyond the home AV hardware level costs would be a monthly subscription fee.
It’s clear that there are a lot of applications and a wealth of possibilities ahead. A gamechanger indeed.
Contact VividQ directly to find out more, or try out the tech yourself at CIN Live 2026 over 20-21 October 2026. You can register to attend the show online.
