Aexa’s CEO receives an outstanding award from InfraGard
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Aexa’s CEO receives an outstanding award from InfraGard

“I’m extremely honored to receive this recognition for my outstanding achievement as Chief of InfraGard Defense Industrial Base Houston. I am proud; however, it’s a team award. We work together, and it takes a team to do what we’re doing.”

Fernando De La Peña Llaca is currently the Chief of the Defense Industrial Base SIG in Houston.

InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector for the protection of U.S. Critical Infrastructure. Through seamless collaboration, InfraGard connects owners and operators within critical infrastructure to the FBI, to provide education, information sharing, networking, and workshops on emerging technologies and threats. InfraGard’s vetted membership includes: business executives, entrepreneurs, lawyers, security personnel, military and government officials, IT professionals, academia and state and local law enforcement—all dedicated to contributing industry-specific insight and advancing national security.

Houston Chronicle

There but not there – Aexa wants you to ‘holoport’ to work

Fernando De La Peña Llaca, CEO and President of Aexa Aerospace, poses for a portrait in his office on Aug. 25, 2020. hoto: Pu Ying Huang, Houston Chronicle / Contributor

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/texas-inc/article/There-but-not-there-Aexa-wants-you-to-15574933.php

Having pioneered technology that’s been used in outer space and underwater, Fernando De La Pena believes his company’s next frontier is either the at doctor’s office or on the oil rig.

Houston-based Aexa Aerospace, which has long specialized in developing software and communications technology for NASA and defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Technologies Corp., and Teledyne Technologies, is preparing to market the most recent iteration of its so-called “holographic Teleportation” product.

In layman’s terms, holographic teleportation is an augmented reality (AR) training application in which users don special lenses in order to receive three-dimensional instruction from someone off-site whose image is projected through the lens via a hologram. For example, the application can allow an engineer to simulate a “walk” through a space station, or for a doctor to “appear” in a patient’s home.

Fernando De La Peña Llaca, CEO and President of Aexa Aerospace, presses a virtual button while immersed in the HoloWizard application on Aug. 25, 2020. photo: Pu Ying Huang, Houston Chronicle / Contributor

Aexa Aerospace, whose name is derived from a combination of “aerospace” and “exabyte” (which is equal to 1 billion gigabytes), first tested its holographic teleportation technology as a potential medical device last year. At the time, the company worked with NASA on a simulation in which a NASA surgeon was “holoported” from the agency’s Houston headquarters to Florida’s undersea Aquarius laboratory to evaluate a patient, according to De La Pena, Aexa’s CEO.

With the success of that simulation, Aexa, which has 17 employees, most of whom are Texas, has fined-tuned the product into what it calls HoloWizard, which debuted earlier this year and allows for both one-way (where the lens-wearing recipient receives the holographic imaging) and two-way holographic teleportation (where both parties use the lenses and receive 3D images of the other party).

De La Pena says HoloWizard’s uses can range from training employees on far-flung oil rigs to simulating a deployed soldier sitting down for a meal with his family and to medical consultations.

“Imagine I’m trying to instruct somebody to perform CPR. If I’m in Texas and my partner is in Alabama, the person in Alabama can see a holographic representation. He can put his hands over my hands,” said De La Pena. “You can’t do that with a two-dimensional video conference.”

HoloWizard is the most recent step in De La Pena’s evolution within Houston’s technology sector. For about a decade prior to founding Aexa Aerospace in 2012, De La Pena was an engineer for MEI Technologies, whose work with NASA included building communications tools that relayed information about potential damage to the International Space Station.

In Aexa’s early days, the company built virtual-reality (VR) training programs for Raytheon, and has worked with the company at developing 360-degree video tours NASA’s 6.2-million-gallon Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

Aexa Aerospace president Fernando De La Peña Llaca interacts with a holographic representation of Nathan Ream sitting in Peña Llaca’s office. Through the HoloWizard application, users can speak and interact with each other in an augmented reality.Photo: Pu Ying Huang, Houston Chronicle / Contributor

De La Pena said the company is now seeking to expand its client base beyond government contractors by pitching the medical and exploration fields. And while COVID-19 has hampered many of the region’s industries, De La Pena said the pandemic may speed up the adoption of products such as HoloWizard because of travel restrictions.

“Before COVID-19, everybody used to see this technology as a secondary option to travel,” he said. “Now people are saying, ‘we need to use this technology because I can’t travel now, and I don’t know if I can travel next year.”

De La Pena declined to disclose his company’s annual revenue, though said his business was “sustainable” and “still growing” in 2020. He also downplayed any concerns about larger companies getting wind of HoloWizard’s capabilities and potentially developing something even more advanced.

“There’s always that concern, but it’s a huge advantage that we are small and can move very fast,” he said. “If you don’t have multiple companies trying to bring solutions to the table, the technology will be dead. So I like the competition.”

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/texas-inc/article/There-but-not-there-Aexa-wants-you-to-15574933.php#photo-19972980

Aexa’s CEO Named Small Business Champion

Small Business Champion of the Year Award

Today, Aexa’s president and CEO, Fernando De La Peña Llaca, received the Small Business Champion of the Year Award from the Small Business Administration.

De La Peña champions small businesses through his participation in the community. He is the former chairman of the Johnson Space Center Small Business Council and of the Communications Committee of the Johnson Space Center National Management Associaton. De La Peña also serves on the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership (BAHEP) Board of Directors and is the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce’s former aerospace liaison.

Bob Charlet, market president and publisher of the Houston Business Journal, was the master of ceremonies. Yusef Muhammad, president of the Houston chapter of SCORE, and Timm Jeffcoat, district director of SBA, gave the introductions.

The closing comments were offered by Bob Harvey, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership, Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo, and Houston mayor Sylvester Turner.

During the ceremony, De La Peña mentioned that he was extremely honored and grateful to receive the award and share it with his team. “I’m the recipient; however, this is a team effort,” he said.

He also talked about his passion and said that soon we would have a colony on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. He is happy to contribute in some way to that goal.

He said that it was important to have mentors and also important to be one.

Aexa Aerospace on TechNewsWorld

The Long Journey Into Holographic Transportation

By Richard Adhikari
Aug 14, 2020 4:00 AM PT

https://www.technewsworld.com/story/86041.html

Who can forget Princess Leia’s hologram asking for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help in the movie Star Wars? That was perhaps the best-known hologram of the many used in the Star Wars franchise movies, but the power and promise of holographic technology have been depicted in science fiction stories for years.

The starship Voyager’s chief medical officer in Star Trek: Voyager was a hologram and holographic characters and ships are featured in several episodes in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Holographic transportation is “an extension of mixed reality, a new use case if you will,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. “It’s more a variant on telepresence.”

Real World Achievements

Aexa Aerospace, which provides custom software and hologram development for mixed and virtual reality devices for aerospace, medical and other industries, is one of several companies working on holographic transportation.

On June 16, the company demonstrated a holographic interaction between CEO Fernando De La Peña Llaca, in his Houston, Tx. office, and company software architect Nathan Ream (pictured above), in his Huntsville, Ala. office.

Ream’s hologram was imported into De La Peña Llaca’s office, then Ream pointed to various objects and read from a magazine in the CEO’s office in real time, when asked.

The two also played Tic-Tac-Toe. Ream won. However, an attempt to shake hands failed.

Aexa Aerospace has demonstrated the prototype to a potential client in a United States government department, Ream said.

It’s targeting a first release for late summer and that “could be working at the client’s facility before the end of 2020.”

Another player is Portl, which offers a hologram portal that looks like a door, measuring 7 feet tall, 4.5 feet wide, and 2.5 feet deep.

Users can beam a 4K resolution image in real time into the “Holoportal,” as the portal is called, from anywhere in the world.

It has a front-facing camera with motion capture, an AI-based facial recognition built into the bezel at its top, and embedded stereo speakers at head level to let the user interact directly with the audience in real time.

The machine also has USB and HDMI inputs; plugs into a standard 15-amp outlet; is available in 110V and 220V versions; and comes with a smartphone or tablet app for control, with its own dedicated router.

It requires a sustained Internet connection of at least 20 Mbps, and each device comes SIM-enabled for activation and integration with Portl’s proprietary content cloud ecosystem.

Then there’s Microsoft, which last July at Inspire 2019 in Las Vegas showed off its holographic transportation capabilities when Azure Corporate VP Julia White put on a HoloLens 2 headset and generated a full-size hologram of herself with her speech translated simultaneously into Japanese.

For her demonstration, White combined Azure Speech-to-Text, Azure Speech Translation, and neural Text-to-Speech technologies.

Her life-size hologram was created at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture Studios

Immersive Transportation vs Current Technologies

Microsoft researchers coined the name holographic transportation. The company trademarked the term in 2018.

Still, holographic transportation “is not offering anything that augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality and cross reality doesn’t,” Michael Hoffman, a founding partner at Object Theory, told TechNewsWorld. Hoffman was a principal lead on the Microsoft HoloLens team.

For those not yet familiar with the attributes of these emerging technologies:

  • Augmented Reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where computer-generated perceptual information enhances real world objects for several of the user’s senses.
  • Virtual Reality (VR) is a simulated experience on a computer with a headset that may or may not be the same as the real world.
  • Mixed Reality (MR) merges real and virtual worlds.
  • Cross Reality (XR) is any combination of any or all of the other three realities.

Object Theory delivers AR, VR, MR, wearable AR and mobile AR projects to enterprise clients in a diverse set of industries; which include aerospace, architecture, engineering and construction, automotive, health, and manufacturing.

Most of the features immersive transportation offers are also available using videoconferencing.

“I would argue that [immersive transportation] is not offering anything that AR, VR, MR, XR doesn’t,” Hoffman said. “Instead, I would say that it offers a greater sense of presence with the ability to glean the non-verbal aspects of communication, such as emotional state and current focus.”

Expensive Endeavor

Current holographic teleportation capture rigs to make the immersive transportation experience possible “are quite expensive and require huge amounts of computer resources,” Hoffman noted.

Microsoft’s main objective “will be to make it insanely easy to use Azure compute and cognitive services to stand up end-to-end holographic teleportation experiences on any device on the market,” he added.

As for Portl, “Hotels, museums, casinos, malls, boardrooms, hospitals and airports are some of the categories we serve,” company CEO and founder David Nussbaum told TechNewsWorld. “But, perhaps most importantly, Portl devices, technology and software will be utilized quite a bit in education.”

Like Cisco’s initial forays into video teleconferencing, which required expensive fixed setups and substantial investments to instantiate, the current version of immersive technology “is probably not how the eventual technology will shake out,” Michael Jude, a research director at IDC, told TechNewsWorld.

Still, “It’s sufficient to generate interest and get developers thinking about applications and technology improvements,” he added.

5G Should Help

Eventually the ongoing evolution and drop in prices for the technology, and advances in 5G and edge computing, will offer “enough compute and bandwidth at an affordable price to support real-time, high fidelity, full 3D body scan teleportation,” Hoffman predicted.

That may happen sooner than expected. For example, Aexa’s HoloPort uses PCs and Microsoft HoloLens 1 or 2, and an Azure Kinect camera.

For the demo between Le La Peña Llaca and Ream, the CEO wore a Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Ream sat in front of an Azure Kinect camera connected to his Windows 10 PC’s USB port.

The Kinect camera sends a live point cloud to a HoloLens user across the Internet, Ream told TechNewsWorld. A point cloud is a set of points in space representing a 3D object, and a live point cloud is one that updates in real time.

Bandwidth requirements are about 10 Mbps, Ream advised.

Currently, the HoloPort supports Microsoft HoloLens 1 and HoloLens 2, and Aexa is looking at incorporating support for more AR and VR devices in the future.

Aexa’s technology is encrypted so “any user can install and run it from their own servers,” noted Ream.

Meanwhile, 5G capability may become more widespread soon. In December, Amazon announced AWS Wavelength, an Amazon Web Services infrastructure offering that’s optimized for mobile edge computing applications.

“Amazon’s promise of single digit latency with Wavelength would likely be very helpful for holographic teleportation applications as delay in communications hurts the sense of realism the application is trying to provide,” Ream observed.

More Development Needed

Holographic teleportation “needs to be more realistic, it needs to have the instrumentation on the body be more complete, and it still needs more advancements in virtual rendering,” Rob Enderle remarked.

“But these problems exist for mixed reality in general, so, once the base technology fully matures, [immersive telepresence] will become far more accepted and useful. The technology isn’t yet where it needs to be to make the use case fully viable,” he added.

Aexa’s Ream asserted that holographic teleportation “is certainly early days, but we believe in the future of the technology and wish to push it forward.”

“Future features combined with more widely available hardware will lead to holographic teleportation becoming another tool in the way we communicate and interact, much like videoconferencing has,” he concluded.