HoloWizard
Innovative 3D Telemedicine to Help Keep Astronauts Healthy
As Aexa’s CEO, I’m very proud to share this article published on NASA’s website. We are the first to perform the first off-planet Holographic teleportation in human history. Next week we’ll be the first to perform the first off-planet two-way Holoporatation in human history. Our portable technology has unlimited medical and engineering applications, among other industries. Next quarter we’ll make our technology public, so anyone can use Holographic teleportation as a new way to communicate. Enjoy this article:
Houston Chronicle
There but not there – Aexa wants you to ‘holoport’ to work
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.
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.
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.”
Aexa Aerospace on Fox News
HOUSTON – June 16, 2020 – Holographic teleportation is possible. During COVID-19 times, a company based in Houston, Texas, developed holographic teleportation, to facilitate telework.
Aexa Aerospace is a contractor for NASA and the creator of the Holowizard, which is an augmented-reality application to support real-time operations.
During the demonstration, Aexa Aerospace CEO Fernando De La Peña Llaca, located in Friendswood, Texas, holoported with his software developer Nathan Ream in Huntsville, Alabama. The holographic representation of the developer projected from Alabama interacted with real objects in Texas.
This is no longer science fiction. It is possible to bring an expert to the worksite, a doctor to the patient’s home for a house call or a loved one close to the user. There are so many powerful possibilities.
The full video demo is here: https://youtu.be/3LNnSOrC5DI.
For more information, please visit https://aexa.com/.
Media Contact:
Karen Gress
Phone: 713.260.9624
Email: karengress@aexa.us