Who is Bob Stone
A man of conviction and passion
Robert (Bob) Stone is Professor of Interactive Multimedia Systems within the Department of Electronic, Electrical & Systems Engineering at the University of Birmingham, where he is also Director of the Human Interface Technologies (HIT) Team.
Bob joined academia in 2003, after a career as a Director of a small commercial Virtual Reality (VR) company he founded in 1989 in Manchester. He graduated from University College London in 1979 with a BSc in Psychology, and in 1981 with an MSc in Ergonomics. Bob is a Chartered Ergonomist and Human Factors Specialist (CErgHF), a Fellow of the UK’s Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors (he was one of the first British ergonomists in 1996 to receive European accreditation) and a Chartered Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Bob also currently holds the position of Visiting Professor in Simulation Psychology within the University of Plymouth, his home town, and was made an Honorary Professor of the South Russia State Technical University (Novocherkassk) at that University’s 100th Anniversary in 2007.
In May 1996, Bob was elected to become an Academician of the Russian International Higher Education Academy of Sciences in Moscow and was, in 2000, accredited by General Klimuk, Director of Russia’s Gagarin Space Centre as responsible for “introducing VR into the cosmonaut space programme”.
What we do
Keep it simple
During his time in industry, Bob undertook research into the rôle of human factors/ergonomics in the implementation of VR, with regular contributions to VR applications projects in the fields of defence, surgery, heritage, engineering and health and safety aspects of VR.
In 2001, he was the lead author for the British Government’s Getting Started in VR CD, one of the deliverables targeting industrial and academic organisations to emerge from the Department of Trade & Industry’s VR Awareness Initiative (which he was instrumental in starting in 1996). He was the Research Director of the UK Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre for over 6 years (during its existence between 2003 and 2012), and it is from within this Centre that many of his team’s projects originate, covering human-centred design and evaluation methodologies for applications as varied as close-range weapons training and support for surgical and mental health therapies, submarine safety awareness, IED search and disposal training and unmanned systems operation, including the use of low-cost drones for remote sensor data visualisation.
Bob and his team adopt a very pragmatic approach to Human Factors research and he regularly spends time conducting observational studies in the field with subject matter experts. This has taken him from Royal Navy vessels conducting close-range weapons and missile trials to underwater operations onboard submarines and rescue submersibles; from oil and gas support platforms in the North Sea to remotely operated vehicle trials in the waters around Scotland; and from search-and-rescue helicopters over the mountains and coasts of Wales and Cornwall to operating theatres and medical units throughout the UK, US and South Africa. From an impact perspective, Bob’s defence research has influenced the uptake of VR technologies – in particular submarine safety training – throughout the Armed Forces in the UK, Canada and Australia, and his team’s high-fidelity CUTLASS bomb disposal simulator, the result of 3 years of Dstl research funding, is now installed in ordnance disposal squadrons across the UK (Including Northern Ireland), Cyprus and Gibraltar. More recently, Bob and his team have been undertaking innovative research for Dstl and BAE Systems addressing future reconfigurable multimodal and mixed reality centres for naval and land-based command and control applications.
His early medical Human Factors efforts led to the development of a world-first keyhole surgical skills VR trainer (MIST), marketed and developed further by Mentice of Sweden. As a result of this work, Bob became a co-director of the North of England Wolfson Centre for Human-Centred Medical Technologies (1994 to 2005) and sat on a working party on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Joint Committee on Higher Surgical Training (JCHST) investigating the assessment of surgical training and competence (1999-2002) and, in January 2000, passed the Royal College of Surgeons of England Basic Surgical Skills course. Between 2005 and 2007, Bob was a Human Factors consultant to the US Office of Naval Research-funded Pulse!! Virtual Healthcare Project (collaborating with Texas A&M University Corpus Christi).
Today, he works closely with the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, researching the use of VR for healthcare restoration and rehabilitation programmes for military and civilian patients in Intensive Care and a unique Mixed Reality solution for the training of future defence medics deployed as part of Medical Emergency Response Teams.
From 1980 to 1989 he was involved in defence human factors research, later in the rôle of group leader at British Aerospace’s Sowerby Research Centre in Bristol, UK. As well as building up experience of working in the defence arena, he specialised in research relating to offshore operations and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). This involved theoretical and trials-based projects performed under contract to the UK Department of Energy, as well as actual dives in 3-person (LR2) and 1-person (Mantis) submersibles, of relevance to his NATO Submarine Rescue work in 2002. For this research he was awarded the UK Ergonomics Society’s 1985 Applications Award. He has also been involved in studies of diving supervisor workload in the North Sea onboard Occidental’s MSV Tharos and Texaco’s DSV Orelia support vessels. After the early BAe work, he was actively involved in the telerobotics field, carrying out review, consultancy and experimental studies for the nuclear industry, the European Space Agency, TRW (Los Angeles), NASA and SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe). In 1987, he became one of the first Europeans to experience the NASA VIEW Virtual Reality System at Moffat Field in California, an experience that proved to be a major turning point for his career.
In 1989, Bob left BAe to join the UK’s National Advanced Robotics Research Centre in Salford, supported by the DTI and a range of industrial shareholders. There he formed a team of human factors and software specialists in order to develop VR technologies for sophisticated mobile and manipulative robots. During that time he co-invented the Teletact I and II Gloves – the world’s first tactile feedback glove systems for VR and telepresence applications. After a successful 3 years of R&D, the Robotics Centre became commercial (Intelligent Systems Solutions Limited) and, following an appearance on the BBC’s 9 O’Clock News in January, 1993, he brought together (initially) 12 companies to fund the world’s first industrial collaborative project addressing the commercial uses of VR. VR Solutions was launched as a company in its own right in October, 1995 and merged with London-based Virtual Presence Limited in June of 1997.
As well as projects in the engineering, aerospace, defence and medical sectors, Bob’s team also pioneered early developments in Virtual Heritage, including Virtual Stonehenge, launched at the London Planetarium on the eve of the 1996 Summer Solstice, hosted by the late Sir Patrick Moore and English Heritage’s Chairman at the time, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, and featuring the world’s first virtual sunrise and synthetic grass smell effects! Bob’s team also pioneered the use of VR to bring artwork to life, notably Coming from the Mill (c. 1930) by the artist L.S. Lowry. These and other cultural heritage projects supported Bob and colleagues from the US and Japan to launch the international Virtual Systems & Multi-Media organisation (VSMM), of which he was President from 1999-2002. Bob is also a trustee of the US Institute for the Visualization of History. Today, he continues research in the field of cultural heritage and is particularly interested in digital inclusion and public engagement, especially in maritime heritage. In 2006, he led the Virtual Scylla project, a unique maritime archaeology and ocean ecosystem initiative based on Europe’s first artificial reef, in collaboration with the National Marine Aquarium and the Marine Biological Association, designed to exploit the use of “serious games” and artificial life technologies to educate children and adults alike to the fragility of coastal ecosystems. More recently, Bob has been involved with maritime projects based on the 1914 loss of the submarine HMS A7, HMS Anne – a 17th Century ship of the line, GLAUCUS, the UK’s first subsea habitat, and the exploitation of remotely controlled ground, air and underwater systems in support of heritage site surveys. His Birmingham Team have gained a significant reputation for conducting innovative exploration and sensor evaluation projects using small unmanned air vehicles, or “drones”. He is the lead VR specialist for the UK’s Mayflower 400 programme, looking to exploit VR, AR and MxR technologies for the public and schoolchildren in 2020 – the 400th anniversary of the transatlantic crossing of the ship that took the Pilgrims to the New World.
Bob has featured on TV and radio programmes dealing with Virtual Reality, in many newspaper and trade journal articles on the subject, and lectures widely on Virtual Reality at professional institutions, universities and public functions across the UK. He has represented the UK (invited lectures) at international robotics and VR functions as far abroad as Madrid, Monte Carlo, Paris, La Coruña, the Russian Gagarin Space Centre, Starocherkassk, Singapore, Rome, Pisa, Stuttgart, Tokyo and Gifu (Japan), Montreal, San Francisco, San Antonio, Phoenix, New Orleans, Orlando, New York, Santa Barbara and Charleston (West Virginia; in the rôle of consultant to the Governor’s Office of Science & Technology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science), India, China, Taiwan, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. In 1993, he received the Ergonomics Society’s Otto Edholm Award for his work in the field of VR. Between 1992 and 1994 he presented the IEE’s (today the IET) Silvanus P Thompson Lecture Series on VR across the UK, Eire and Germany and gave the IEE’s 1996 Christmas Lecture and 1998 Faraday Lectures, again focusing on VR. During 2004 and 2005, he is once again lecturing across the UK for the IEE, this time a Prestige Lecture Series on the topic: Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality? In 1996, he was awarded the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Sir Vernon Brown Prize for the best paper of 1995 on VR for aircraft maintenance. In 1997, he gave the British Association’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel Special Lecture in Leeds and the Channel 4 Lecture, entitled A Glimpse Into the Virtual Future in Birmingham. Later that year, he was made the first Honorary Fellow of the Virtual Reality Society. In 1999, Bob was awarded the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art, Commerce and Manufactures’ Howorth Medal, for “…distinguished contributions, over time, to successful industrial or commercial achievement, and to life in the (North West) region, through outstanding innovation and enterprise…”. In 2003, he was awarded the Laval Virtual Trophée d’Honneur for his “service to the European Virtual Reality Community” since 1987 and, in the same year, was made an Honorary Cossack at a ceremony in Starocherkassk, the former Don Cossack regional capital, recognising his decade of VR collaboration with the Russians. Also in 2003, he was awarded the UK Ergonomics Society’s Sir Frederic Bartlett Award, the highest award given by that Society to an individual (and the first time ever that an individual had been awarded by the Society three times in their career). In 2011, Bob was awarded the MoD Chief Scientific Advisor’s Commendation for his contributions to Defence Science & Technology, the highest award given to an individual by that Governmental Department.