Tom Caudell

Tom Caudell (Thomas Preston Caudell) is a physicist and professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering who coined the term "augmented reality" while working as a scientist at Boeing. The University of New Mexico dates the coinage to 1990, and the term appeared in print in "Augmented reality: an application of heads-up display technology to manual manufacturing processes," a paper Caudell and his Boeing colleague David Mizell presented at the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January 1992. The paper described a see-through head-mounted display with head tracking that would overlay wiring diagrams and other manufacturing data from CAD systems onto the parts a factory worker was assembling.

Caudell was program co-chair of the first IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS) in Seattle in 1993, a conference series that IEEE VR now lists among its own past conferences. He joined the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1994, where his group built the Flatland virtual environment software and used it for immersive medical training simulations. He retired from UNM in 2014 and is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering.

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked UNM bios and 2012 CV, the full 1992 HICSS paper text, the CoNNections VRAIS 1993 report, MIT Technology Review, IEEE VR past-conference list, Crossref metadata for all cited papers, the Routledge book page, the Flatland and IAMSE pages and the patent record. About review dates.

Early life and education

Caudell earned bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from California State University in 1973, then a master's degree (1978) and a PhD (1980) in physics from the University of Arizona. UNM's Center for Emerging Energy Technologies describes the doctorate as a PhD in physics with a minor in astronomy. His curriculum vitae lists the bachelor's degrees as coming from Cal State Pomona and records postdoctoral and research assistant professor positions in the University of Arizona's physics department from 1980 to 1984. His early publications were in solar physics and optics.

Career

Hughes Research Laboratories

In 1984 Caudell became a senior staff physicist at the Hughes Artificial Intelligence Center in Malibu, California, where, according to UNM, he did artificial intelligence, virtual reality and neural network research. His CV dates the position to 1984-1989 and places the center within Hughes Research Laboratories.

Boeing and augmented reality

Caudell joined Boeing in 1989 as a senior principal scientist in Research and Technology at Boeing Computer Services, working on neural networks and augmented reality. His neural network work there included NIRS, a system that used adaptive resonance theory (ART-1) networks to retrieve engineering designs, described in a 1994 paper in Neural Networks.

The augmented reality project started from an aircraft manufacturing problem. MIT Technology Review reported in 2014 that in 1990 Caudell was trying to help workers who assembled long bundles of wires for the new Boeing 777, and that he and Mizell proposed giving them a see-through display that superimposed the wire routes on the assembly board.

The 1992 paper set out the idea in detail. Caudell and Mizell proposed a "HUDset," a heads-up, see-through display headset combined with head position sensing and a registration system that tied the graphics to the workpiece, so that a computer-generated diagram stayed fixed on a real object as the wearer moved. They explained the name directly: the technology "is used to 'augment' the visual field of the user with information necessary in the performance of the current task, and therefore we refer to the technology as 'augmented reality' (AR)." The paper contrasted this with what the authors called "full" virtual reality: an AR system only had to draw simple wireframes, outlines, designators and text (about 50 or fewer lines), so it could run on standard PC-class processors, but it needed much more accurate registration with the physical world. The paper cited Ivan Sutherland's display as the first head-mounted display to use head position sensing to stabilize graphics on a real-world scene, and noted a see-through display built in 1985 by Warren Robinett and colleagues at the University of North Carolina.

As a proof of concept, the pair built a demonstration system from a Private Eye head-mounted PC display from Reflection Technologies, a Polhemus 3D Isotrack magnetic tracker that reported six degrees of freedom up to fifty times a second, and an Intel 386-based computer. It demonstrated four applications: marking peg positions and wire paths on a wiring formboard, showing which pin of a connector each wire belonged in, outlining where to place composite cloth during layup, and animating a 3D wireframe of a part along its removal path for maintenance. The authors listed its weaknesses: the Private Eye was not truly see-through (the graphics reached only the right eye), its eyepiece was not rigidly mounted, its narrow field of view felt like looking through a cardboard tube, and there was lag between head motion and the graphics. As an intermediate step they built a see-through version that used a dichroic beam splitter, and they described a "cellular" arrangement of overlapping magnetic transmitters to extend tracking along a long formboard.

The system did not catch on at the time. Caudell told MIT Technology Review that this was largely because head tracking was not responsive enough while people moved around and wearable computers were far less powerful than they later became. At VRAIS '93, A. L. Janin, Mizell and Caudell presented "Calibration of head-mounted displays for augmented reality applications." At the same symposium Caudell, Janin and S. K. Johnson presented a neural network model of face animation for telecommuting in virtual reality. His CV lists Boeing Computer Services' Technical Excellence Award and Boeing Commercial Aircraft's Pi Quality Award, both in 1993, and an affiliate associate professorship in electrical engineering at the University of Washington from 1991 to 1995.

VRAIS 1993

The first IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium was held in Seattle from 18 to 22 September 1993, sponsored by the Virtual Reality Technical Committee of the IEEE Neural Networks Council. In his report on the event in the council's newsletter, Caudell signed as chair of that technical committee and as VRAIS '93 program co-chair. The report credits Thomas Furness as general chair and records 477 registered attendees from more than 18 countries, nearly twice the expected number, and a 400-page proceedings of 72 papers selected by a 50-member program committee. The same issue's president's column credited the committee "headed by Tom Caudell" with organizing and running the symposium. Caudell's CV lists him as editor of the 1993 proceedings. The 1997 symposium was held in Albuquerque.

University of New Mexico

Caudell moved to UNM in 1994. His CV records a visiting research associate professorship from August 1993, an associate professorship in electrical and computer engineering from January 1994 (tenured in 1998), and a full professorship from July 2006, with secondary appointments in computer science (from 2001) and psychology (from 2009). He directed the UNM Center for High Performance Computing from February 2007 to June 2009.

One of his early VR projects at UNM was an interface called the Homunculus. A 1995 paper in the International Journal of Virtual Reality described it as a way for an experimenter to explore complex systems through immersive virtual reality, with modules of a biologically motivated neural architecture called the Encephalon shown as 3D icons and the information flowing between them shown as animations. He continued to work on AR hardware and theory. With students Dohyung Kim and Scott Richards he presented an optical tracker for augmented reality and wearable computers at VRAIS '97, and he wrote an "Introduction to augmented and virtual reality" for SPIE's telemanipulator and telepresence technologies proceedings. With Woodrow Barfield he edited Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), an 814-page text covering tracking, displays, registration, AR applications and wearable computers, and the two co-wrote its chapter "Basic Concepts in Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality." A 1999 paper with E. W. Saad and D. C. Wunsch applied neural networks to predictive head tracking for virtual reality.

Sound for virtual environments was another thread. With his student Nadine Miner he developed a wavelet-based technique for synthesizing realistic, parameterized sounds that a virtual environment simulation could control in real time, published in Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments in 2002. Miner and Caudell are the named inventors on U.S. Patent 6,748,355, "Method of sound synthesis," filed in January 1998 and granted on 8 June 2004; the patent names virtual reality, multimedia, computer gaming and the web as applications.

Flatland and medical simulation

Flatland was a virtual environment and visualization system that Caudell and Kenneth L. Summers created at UNM. A 2005 paper describes it as an open source visualization and virtual reality application development environment, written in C/C++ on OpenGL. Caudell, Yunhai Xiao and Michael Healy paired it with eLoom, a neural architecture specification and simulation engine, to visualize hierarchical neural network models, as described in Neural Networks in 2003.

Flatland was also used in medical education research. Project TOUCH (Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health), a collaboration between UNM's School of Medicine and the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii, used Flatland together with an artificial intelligence simulation engine and the Access Grid network to run a virtual patient case for problem-based learning across sites; Caudell was lead author of the 2003 paper on its technical design. In the follow-up study, students wearing a head-mounted display with trackers managed a simulated closed head injury patient, saw each other as avatars and could work together across long distances. Seven pairs of medical students took part in the collaborative sessions, and among 48 students tested before and after the simulation, knowledge structure scores improved significantly for those with lower starting scores. Later papers in the series covered distance learning with the simulator in Simulation in Healthcare and a study of locomotion paradigms for immersive medical simulation in The Visual Computer.

Later work and retirement

UNM describes Caudell's main research area as computational cognitive neural science and neural networks, including neurobiologically motivated mathematical theories and simulations of neural systems, with research interests listed as neural networks, computational neural science and category theory. According to UNM's Center for Emerging Energy Technologies, he retired in 2014 and is emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering and a research professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2012 he was interviewed for the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's oral history project.

Selected XR publications

Year	Title	Authors	Venue
1992	Augmented reality: an application of heads-up display technology to manual manufacturing processes	Caudell, Mizell	Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
1993	Calibration of head-mounted displays for augmented reality applications	Janin, Mizell, Caudell	IEEE VRAIS '93
1993	Neural modeling of face animation for telecommuting in virtual reality	Caudell, Janin, Johnson	IEEE VRAIS '93
1995	A Virtual Environment Interface to Complex Autonomous Perceptual Systems	Caudell	International Journal of Virtual Reality
1997	An optical tracker for augmented reality and wearable computers	Kim, Richards, Caudell	IEEE VRAIS '97
1999	Predictive head tracking for virtual reality	Saad, Caudell, Wunsch	IJCNN '99
2001	Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality (editors)	Barfield, Caudell	Lawrence Erlbaum
2002	A Wavelet Synthesis Technique for Creating Realistic Virtual Environment Sounds	Miner, Caudell	Presence
2003	Virtual patient simulator for distributed collaborative medical education	Caudell et al.	The Anatomical Record Part B
2009	A study of locomotion paradigms for immersive medical simulation environments	Lee, Liu, Caudell	The Visual Computer

Legacy

In a 2014 article on augmented reality in the workplace, MIT Technology Review opened with Caudell and Mizell's wiring project, credited Caudell with coming up with the term "augmented reality," and noted that improvements in the tracking technology that "bedeviled Caudell and Mizell" were making AR more useful. The 1992 paper had itself called position sensing "the ultimate limitation of AR."