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An immersive tale HoloTrac Face Recognition
From his time working in vehicle development to Holovis’ start in the enterprise sector and subsequent expansion into immersive entertainment, Stuart Hetherington talks to Park World
Charlotte Westwood: Tell us about your background Stuart Hetherington: I graduated from DMU in Leicester after studying Electronic Engineering & Computing, and my first full-time role was working as an engineer in vehicle development and testing at the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) in Warwickshire.
I was involved in the exciting world of automotive research and testing, which included every young engineer’s dream of getting to crash some rather expensive cars and prototypes! I was initially responsible for the data acquisition systems, but as my career progressed, I ended up focusing more on the simulation side of vehicle development and secured funding for a unique data-suit concept I developed for analysing the motion of the crash test dummies and the deforming vehicle in 3D space. This initial data-suit R&D project led me to working with various higher- education and research groups both in the UK and US where I saw other emerging technologies specific to large scale immersive and virtual reality systems that I believed could be evolved and applied to many aspects of vehicle development.
I got further funding to develop what would have been Europe’s first VR Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. Myself and my then boss, Joe Jurado, developed the solution and business case to build the first ever CAVE here in the UK as a service for the automotive industry. Sadly, that vision didn’t come to fruition as we’d hoped; essentially we were 10 years ahead of ourselves in the automotive industry. The vehicle data we needed just didn’t exist to the extent we required it, and the
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computing systems to run the real-time simulations in the CAVE at that time were very limited and prohibitively expensive!
Joe and I ended up leaving the automotive industry and worked in the simulation and training sector delivering VR CAVEs, immersive domes and simulators to many of the early adopters of the technology where they could be effectively applied, including military, aerospace, oil and gas, higher education and research establishments, before I decided to start Holovis and further develop these solutions directly, with Joe joining a short while later as our technical director.
CW: You founded Holovis in 2004. What was your vision for the business at the time? SH: Our vision for the business at that time was to become a world- leader in utilising emerging technologies in the development of turn-key immersive, virtual systems, CAVEs and domes for design and simulation, focusing on the enterprise sector. In those early days we had no idea how we would grow and diversify to the scale we are now and branch into the experiential and entertainment sectors! Our enterprise offerings were the start of Holovis, and eventually we did come full circle, and finally delivered on our original vision at MIRA, when we built the world’s first 4K-resolution automotive VR CAVE for Jaguar Land Rover in 2006 to support their vehicle design and development processes, with Jaguar Land Rover becoming one of our biggest customers at that time, along with several other automotive OEMs.
CW: How has Holovis evolved since then? SH: As we grew the business, we realised we needed to scale up at pace and that’s when Andrew Brown joined Holovis as our strategy director.
JULY 2023
Stuart Hetherington
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