Eric Howlett

Eric Howlett (1926-2011) was an American engineer and inventor who created LEEP (Large Expanse, Extra Perspective), an extreme wide-angle stereoscopic photography system whose viewing lenses became the basis of most early virtual reality head-mounted displays. He first showed LEEP in 1980 as a consumer stereo photography product and patented it in 1983. NASA Ames Research Center began using LEEP lenses in its head-mounted displays in 1985, VPL Research and others followed, and Howlett went on to sell his own headset, the Cyberface, from March 1989.

Ohio State University computer graphics historian Wayne Carlson wrote that LEEP "provided the basis for most of the virtual reality helmets that were developed." His company, LEEP Systems, Inc., was based in Waltham, Massachusetts. He died in Acton, Massachusetts, on December 11, 2011, at the age of 84.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked every claim against the Boston Globe obituary, Carlson's OSU history, US patent 4,406,532, Crossref/SPIE records for the 1990 and 1992 papers, the 1984 SPSE talk, Wired 2.03, V-Rtifacts, UTSIC, Rakkolainen et al. 2016, heise online, the Virtual Reality Society profile and LeepVR's first-person pages. About review dates.

Early life and education

Howlett was born in Miami in 1926. His parents divorced when he was a baby. His mother, Margaret Gardner Mayorga, raised him in New York; she began and edited a series of books called One-Act Plays by American Authors. As a high school senior he was one of 40 students chosen nationwide for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and the award included a trip to the White House, where he met Eleanor Roosevelt in 1944.

Grumman Aircraft gave him a full scholarship to any university, and he chose the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After a stint in the US Navy he finished his physics degree, graduating in 1949. LeepVR, the company he later co-founded with his son, describes the degree as an ScB in physics.

Career

Engineering and early businesses

After graduating, Howlett went into business for himself repairing televisions while also inventing electronic devices. In the 1950s he worked at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory on radar, and later at General Electric, where he built electrical systems and early warning radar for the military. LeepVR gives his GE role as project engineer in the Heavy Military Electronics Division.

In the 1960s he joined Adage Inc., a company co-founded by his friend Thomas G. Hagan, and became its director of research. He also held marketing manager and engineering manager roles there. He then founded NUMEX, a display company built around a projected numerical readout. The Virtual Reality Society dates it to the late 1960s and notes that segmented displays soon made the technology obsolete. He went on to start several more companies, consult, and work on other inventions.

LEEP stereo photography

According to LeepVR, Howlett made the first complete LEEP stereo photograph, a self-portrait, in the summer of 1979. He took it with a Speed Graphic camera carrying a custom lens board with two lenses 2.5 inches apart. Carlson also gives 1979 as the year Howlett designed the LEEP optical system. Howlett gave the first public demonstration in March 1980 at the Photographic Society of America convention in Las Vegas. Writing for heise online in 2025, Josef Erl described the LEEP Panoramic Stereo Photography System as a wide-angle camera and a viewer with a field of view of up to 140 degrees.

Howlett filed his patent application on March 25, 1980. U.S. Patent 4,406,532, "Wide angle color photography method and system", was granted on September 27, 1983. It describes forming an image while introducing a predetermined chromatic difference in lateral magnification, storing it on a medium such as color film, and then forming a second image from it while introducing the opposite difference. In other words, the camera lens deliberately adds lateral color that the viewing lens then cancels. In a 1984 talk to the Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers, Howlett explained that if the center of the eye is placed where the camera's aperture stop was and looks back through the same lens, the viewer sees an undistorted replica of the original scene, while the lateral chromatism is restored only to a degree because color film records just three color bands. In a 1992 paper he summed up the viewing optics as using "a radial compression format to provide a very wide field with minimum loss of resolution at the center."

The photography business failed. The Boston Globe reported that Kodak and Polaroid both turned the invention down, and that Howlett's small staff at the Waltham Watch Factory could not fill scores of orders. In a 2006 account Howlett wrote that he had 70 early orders, built 20 cameras and shipped only the three that worked properly. He let his four to six employees go in 1985 or 1986, after an unrelated product that had been paying for the work dried up and his second mortgage was maxed out. He and photographer Ulrich Figge did ship between one and two hundred LEEP viewers with sample slides, plus lens sets, at prices from US$840 to US$3,500. Figge told the Globe: "It was just too hard to do, and the money ran out."

Adoption in virtual reality

In Howlett's account, NASA Ames engineer Michael McGreevy heard about the viewers, visited in 1985, and began ordering them. McGreevy also advised VPL Research, which NASA had been supporting, to use LEEP lenses in its head-mounted displays. NASA and VPL became Howlett's main customers, and Disney followed later. The Globe likewise reported that NASA and Disney bought the system. Carlson writes that the original LEEP system was redesigned in 1985 for NASA Ames' first virtual reality installation, the VIEW workstation led by Scott Fisher. A photo caption on LeepVR states that NASA's VIVED headset of 1985 used LEEP optics.

LeepVR lists A.F.I.T. (the Air Force Institute of Technology), Autodesk, MIT and the University of North Carolina among other groups that used LEEP optics. It also quotes a 1989 Dataquest research newsletter as saying the optics were "used in essentially all AR head-mounted displays", where "AR" meant "artificial reality". The VR hardware collection site V-Rtifacts notes that the two leading headset makers, VPL Research and Virtual Research, used the same optics, lenses from LEEP Systems. The Virtual Research Flight Helmet used them too. In 1988, at the request of NASA and a sensory research group at MIT, Howlett's company designed very wide-angle LEEP-format lenses for video cameras. LeepVR says this made very wide-angle telepresence possible.

Cyberface and LEEP Systems

Howlett recalled a NASA contact telling him that a system like VPL's could sell for more than US$10,000 to academic and federal labs, and that led to his own headset. He released the Cyberface in March 1989. VPL released its EyePhone in June 1989, also using LEEP optics. LeepVR calls the Cyberface the first commercial head-mounted display. The University of Toronto Scientific Instrument Collection holds a LEEPvideo System 1, dated 1989. The set has a Cyberface headset, a junction box and the "LEEP Puppet" remote camera head, and it was used at Canada's Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine in Toronto. Howlett wrote that he sold few original Cyberfaces, because they used the same low-resolution monochrome LCD as the NASA and VPL headsets.

The business before LEEP Systems was called POP-OPTIX LABS. Howlett assigned his patent to LEEP Systems, Inc., a Massachusetts corporation at 241 Crescent Street in Waltham, effective April 22, 1991. In his 1992 SPIE paper, published under a LEEP Systems affiliation, he described two projects. The first was the Cyberface2, which widened the lateral field of view by twenty-five degrees. The second added an optical high-resolution insert to the center of the view. Howlett wrote that diverging the optical axes of the viewer lenses made room for two higher-resolution Sharp color LCDs in the Cyberface2, and that it sold better than the original.

The Cyberface3 followed. In a March 1994 Wired review, Simson Garfinkel described it as a counterbalanced, back-lit LCD display strapped to the head that sent head movements to a host computer over RS-232. Six buttons on top controlled movement through a virtual world. It lacked binocular vision, since both eyes looked at the same 71 mm wide display. The price was US$14,660. At the end of 1994, Howlett wrote, LEEP Systems won a NASA Small Business Innovation Research contract for a head-mounted display that would let a pilot on the ground fly a remotely controlled helicopter. The display had high-resolution inserts for both eyes, but the project ran out of its fixed budget before it was finished. LeepVR also credits him with a 1994 invention it calls Videowrap.

Papers and presentations

Howlett published his wide-angle display work in conference proceedings and gave talks on virtual reality in the early 1990s. In "Wide-angle orthostereo" (1990), he set about 90 degrees, the region the eyes can view directly, as the minimum field of view needed to support the illusion of being immersed in another space. He wrote that wider fields of up to 270 degrees enhance the illusion, and he described LEEP as the optical system used in almost all existing HMD systems. A 2016 paper by Ismo Rakkolainen, Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer on wide field-of-view headset optics cites that paper and calls LEEP optics "the first feasible way to deliver wide FOV for HMDs."

Year	Title	Venue
1983	"Wide angle color photography method and system"	U.S. Patent 4,406,532
1984	"How Aberrations of the Film Image are Used to Neutralize Lateral Color and Distortion in the Magnifiers of the LEEP System of Ultra Wide Angle Stereophotography"	37th Annual Conference of the Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers, Boston
1990	"Wide-angle orthostereo"	Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 1256, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications, p. 210
1992	"High-resolution inserts in wide-angle head-mounted stereoscopic displays"	Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 1669, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications III, pp. 193-203
1993	"The Need for Realism in Virtual Reality"	Presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Virtual Reality Research and Development, Washington, D.C.

LeepVR

In 2006 Howlett and his son Alex, a software developer, co-founded LeepVR to develop a next generation of LEEP technology. The company's website hosts his accounts of the LEEP project, his papers and pages on past products.

Death

Howlett died of cancer on December 11, 2011, at his home in Acton, Massachusetts, aged 84. His wife Joan Houlihan, his daughter Karle Howlett-Murdock and his sons Alex and Ian survived him. By then his LEEP patent had expired. Thomas G. Hagan told the Globe: "He was one of the smartest people I've ever met."

Legacy

Several histories of virtual reality trace the wide-angle optics of early VR headsets to LEEP. Carlson's history of computer graphics says the LEEP system "provided the basis for most of the virtual reality helmets that were developed". Heise online's 2025 history of early VR headsets says the development "was set rolling in 1980" by Howlett's LEEP system and that NASA's VIEW was based on it. LeepVR quotes the industry report publisher Matrix Information Systems as calling him "...a backbone of the [virtual reality] industry" for inventing the optical system used in essentially all of the original VR head-mounted displays.

See also

• LEEP Systems
• VIVED
• VPL EyePhone
• History of virtual reality