Professor Robert Stone BSc (Hons), MSc, CErgHF, FIEHF, EurErg, C.Psychol, AFBPsS

• MSc (Ergonomics), 1981
• BSc (Hons) Psychology, 1979

Robert (Bob) Stone is a Chartered Ergonomist & Human Factors Specialist and holds a Chair in Interactive Multimedia Systems within the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham, where he is also Director of the Human Interface Technologies (HIT) Team.  He graduated from University College London in 1979 with a BSc in Psychology, and in 1981 with an MSc in Ergonomics.  Stone 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 100^th Anniversary in 2007.  After nine years of Human Factors research at British Aerospace in Bristol, where he specialised in military ergonomics and remotely operated systems (conducting applied research for the Department of Energy and the European Space Agency), Stone was involved in the launch of the UK’s National Advanced Robotics Research Centre, funded by the Department of Trade & Industry.  Stone was the first European to experience the NASA VIEW Virtual Reality (VR) system and, in 1987, he established the UK’s first industrial VR team at the Robotics Centre where, amongst numerous achievements, he developed the world’s first tactile feedback glove for VR applications, Teletact.  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.  The success of this initiative enabled Stone’s group to be launched as VR Solutions Ltd in the mid-1990s, a company in which he remained a Director until 2002.

In May 1996, Stone was elected to become an Academician of the Russian International Higher Education Academy of Sciences and was, in 2000, accredited by General Klimuk, Director of Russia’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre as responsible for “introducing VR into the cosmonaut space programme”.  Stone was the Research Director of the UK Human Factors Integration Defence Technology Centre for over 6 years, 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 to submarine safety awareness, IED search and disposal training and unmanned vehicle control.  Stone 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, Stone’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 bases across the UK (Including Northern Ireland), Cyprus and Gibraltar.  More recently, Stone 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.

Also from an impact perspective, Stone’s pioneering surgical task analysis efforts in the mid-1990s led to the development of a suite of simulated perceptual-motor tasks for a unique keyhole surgery VR trainer (MIST), marketed for nearly a decade by Mentice of Sweden.  From 1999 to 2002, Stone sat on a working party on behalf of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Joint Committee on Higher Surgical Training investigating the assessment of surgical training and competence and, in January 2000, passed the Royal College of Surgeons of England’s Basic Surgical Skills course.  Stone was a Simulation Human Factors consultant to the US Office of Naval Research-funded Pulse!! Virtual Healthcare Project (led by Texas A&M University Corpus Christi).  Today, he works closely with the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, military and civilian medical personnel within the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and the European Centre for Environment and Human Health.  He is also an Honorary Consultant in Human Factors & Simulation within the UK’s Hollier Medical Simulation Centre.  Stone’s team also pioneered early developments in Virtual Heritage, notably Virtual Stonehenge (1996), complete with the world’s first virtual sunrise and accurate night-time sky (a revised version using gaming technologies was delivered to English Heritage in 2009) and Virtual Lowry, a project in which the artist’s Coming From The Mill painting was brought to life using VR techniques.  This and other cultural heritage projects supported Stone and colleagues from the US and Japan to launch the international Virtual Systems & Multi-Media organisation and virtualheritage.net in 1997.  He is also a trustee of the US Institute for the Visualization of History.  Today, Stone continues research in the field of cultural heritage and is particularly interested in digital inclusion and public engagement, maritime heritage (including projects based on the 1914 loss of the submarine HMS A7, HMS Caroline and the Anne, a 17^th Century ship of the line) and the exploitation of remotely controlled ground, air and underwater systems in support of heritage site surveys.  His team has an exclusive relationship with the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

His work has received numerous awards, including, in 2003, the Laval Virtual Trophée d’Honneur for his “service to the European Virtual Reality Community” since 1987.  In 2007, he was awarded the UK Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors’ (previously the Ergonomics Society) 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, he received the MoD Chief Scientific Advisor’s Commendation for his contribution to Defence Science & Technology – one of only four individual recipients in the UK.  Later that year, his Defence Technology Centre Serious Games Team received the BAE Systems Chairman’s Silver Award for simulation research contributing to front line safety.

• Year 1 Group Project (EE1G1)
• Human Factors and Interactive System Design (EE4U)
• Interactive 3D Design for Virtual Environments and Serious Games (EE3K1)
• Advanced Interactive 3D Design for Virtual Environments and Serious Games (EE4A)

• Interactive technologies and fidelity for Virtual Environments and Serious Games
• Augmented Reality technologies and applications (Defence, Medicine, Heritage)
• Interactive visualisation for situational awareness
• Interactive technologies, remote viewing, haptics and manipulation systems for telerobotics and telepresence
• Virtual Environments and Serious Games for psychotherapy, restoration of well-being and rehabilitation
• Virtual Environments and Serious Games for Defence, Space, Underwater Exploration, Heritage, Medicine & Surgery, Education

• Design, application and evaluation of simulation technologies for restorative “blue-green” therapies (Virtual Restorative Environment Therapy)
• Development of fidelity taxonomies and frameworks for Virtual Environments and Serious Games
• Development and evaluation of Virtual Environments and Serious Games for defence training applications
• Design and evaluation of interactive technologies for remote driving and manipulation (subsea, nuclear, space, defence)

• Member of the Learning To Be Safer Expert (Human Factors) Group (Health Education England)
• Honorary Consultant in Human Factors & Simulation within the West Midlands Hollier Medical Simulation Centre

Consultancy R&D:

• Dstl, Aston Martin, BAE Systems, Naval Design Partnership, Maritime Collaborative Enterprise (MarCE), UK Defence Academy, QinetiQ

Former Posts:

• VP Group of Companies / VP Defence Ltd (2001 - 2003). Position: Scientific Director
• VR Solutions Limited (1995 - 2001). Position: Director & General Manager
• Advanced Robotics Research Limited - the National Advanced Robotics Research Centre (1989 – 1995). Position: Technical Manager; Virtual Reality & Telepresence Team Leader
• British Aerospace Sowerby Research Centre (Bristol, UK, 1980 - 1989). Position: Group Leader, Ergonomics - Cognitive Studies/ Manual Control & Space Studies