Western University researchers achieve intercontinental holographic teleportation

menu

HoloWizard

Western University researchers achieve intercontinental holographic teleportation

The holoport technology is being explored as an answer to remote health care.

Researchers at the Western Institute for Space Exploration in London, Ont., connect with a colleague in Alabama to demonstrate holoport technology on Aug. 10, 2022.

The team demonstrated the holoport on Wednesday, connecting with Nathan Ream of Aexa Aerospace, who was in Huntsville, Alabama. Sirek’s company partnered with Aexa in Houston in April to demonstrate a two-way holoport to the International Space Station.

“We brought that space-proven technology here to Western so that our summer students could be working on it to push the boundaries for Canadian health care,” said Sirek.

The project is a joint collaboration between engineering and medical students at Western, including Sirek and Ana Luisa Trjos who are primary investigators, along with engineering student Jocelyn Whittal and medical student Adam Levchuk.

Jocelyn Whittal was holoported from a boardroom at Western’s Interdisciplinary Research Building to Huntsville, Alabama and then to Spain on Wednesday, where Fernando De La Pena Llaca of Aexa was stationed. Whittal is researching the haptic opportunities for the technology, or the ability to incorporate touching and feeling in the 3D holographic space.

“So in space, they’re very far away, and they don’t always send a doctor up with them. So being able to touch them and do a full medical exam would be amazing and making sure that they are okay as well as in rural communities to avoid evacuations,” she said.

Whittal said the cost of medical evacuations from remote areas could cost upwards of $200,000, and if a doctor was able to perform an assessment in the holographic space, a more informed response or course of treatment could be determined.

Adam Levchuk performed a physical exam on Ream using the holoport technology, conducting a shoulder examination.

“As opposed to doing this on Zoom, where he’d be small on a screen, he was a full-sized human hologram right in front of me,” he said. “There’s 3D motion to this hologram as opposed to a 2D on a Zoom call. It just feels a little bit more personal being in the same space as a hologram as opposed to a computer image.”

Levchuk says his next steps are to validate how well the shoulder examination went and hopes to be able to perform similar assessments with astronauts in space.

While Sirek admits that there are still some bugs to iron out and improvements to be made, they’ve proven the technology works and that it could provide the building blocks for opportunities beyond their target application of health care.

“We’ve got an interdisciplinary summer internship where we can have undergraduate students playing with this cutting-edge tech that can expand their boundaries and do things that they never thought they’d be doing in the undergraduate,” said Sirek.

“It’s exciting, it’s fantastic, and hopefully, this will inspire the next generation of people to come up with even better technology than this.”

Source: CBC News

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:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/innovative-3d-telemedicine-to-help-keep-astronauts-healthy

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