Campus Colleagues Collaborate


Polcak, who was born and raised in the city of Brno, can also take pride in his education. In 2015, he graduated from Czech Technical University in Prague with a degree in electrical engineering, specializing in cybernetics (a challenging combo of robotics, algorithms, and biosignals). While attending college he built his first company, one that focused on software and hardware development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices — things like video doorbells connected to the internet. Not only did Polcak build his IoT business at Prague’s respected university, that campus was also a steady source of engineering talent for Vrgineers Inc. He says, “I wasn’t really smart enough to build what I wanted; I’m a managing engineer. So, I gathered colleagues I knew from university. They were specialists in their fields who could design and construct what I thought VR devices could be.”


Polcak strongly believes that collaboration among those specialists is vital, and getting them to work together is his managerial focus. “A technology company that is trying to create revolutionary, or even evolutionary, products needs very specific specialists, but you’ve got to get them to work with one another and get them outside their individual bubbles,” he says. “You’ve


got to get people with very specialized knowledge in their niche to communicate and participate in the overall company.” This philosophy is not original to Polcak; he read it in a biography on electricity industrialist George Westinghouse. “It stated that he got geniuses together and taught them how to communicate with one another. I believe that’s how you build a technology company,” he says. “Building a company requires long hours and hard work. Company leadership has to have that willingness to work harder than average; I have that motor within me to make things. If other people see that in you, they are much more willing to follow you and help you...They have to make their own decisions whether they will support me down the road or not.”


With their support, Polcak thinks that road may lead to unexplored terrain. “We did market research to find other industry sectors our VR technology is best suited for, and two areas stood out. One is remote robotic surgery where a surgeon sits behind our high- resolution display to operate a precise robot to perform surgery remotely, and another (sector) is controlling industrial machines remotely.” For example, in the future an operator of a heavy excavator might not be in the actual machine, but in a remote- control center where with the aid of stereoscopic cameras and other data, he’ll have the inputs to do his job.


One More Thing


Although we’ve disclaimed that Polcak is Steve Jobs, to quote Jobs’ product presentations, Polcak does have “one more thing” for the helicopter industry. Vrgineers technology cannot apply only to flight training, but also to future maintenance. “Virtual reality is suitable for training; augmented reality is suitable for performing physical tasks in reality,” he begins. As he explains, if you want to learn maintenance for a Robinson R44 but don’t have the aircraft where you are, you will load an R44 training module into your


16 Mar/Apr 2022


VR headset and learn from that. If you are actually maintaining the aircraft, you would put on an augmented-reality headset that allows you to see through to the parts you are handling as the maintenance procedure outlines in your field of vision.


Companies like Airbus are currently moving in this direction. It will be exciting to see how far new technology companies like Vrgineers and visionaries like Marek Polcak will take us down the revolutionary road.


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