From its conceptualisation to commercialisation, the imseCAVE – a large-scale immersive VR system that inherited the name of an engineering department at HKU where it was first born, has gone through a long journey to become one of the iconic VR systems having the largest share in the professional market in Hong Kong. Through its birth to becoming a commercial product that fuel start-ups, to its current position as playing a supporting role for sustainable business, the founder tells the story of its evolution and challenges of its survival through business modelling – the essence of successful entrepreneurship. This is an interactive workshop whether participants will have a chance to explore the
process of business modelling. 

Date: March 17, 2023 (Friday)

Time: 3:00-4:00pm

Venue: Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing One, HKU
Speaker: Dr Henry Lau, Head of Cybernetics, RACE, UK Atomic Energy Authority and Founder of VOTANIC

About the speaker:

Dr Henry Lau is the founder of VOTANIC – a spin-off providing the best bespoke VR solutions to create a community of users to deploy VR technology to excel in their business and profession. Before retiring from his positions as Associate Dean (Innovation) in Engineering and Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering or IMSE, he led the VR research team as Director of the Human-Systems Interaction and Simulation Laboratory where they created the first interactive cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) systems at HKU – the imseCAVE in 1998. As a pioneer in VR technology, Henry enjoys the challenges of realising crazy ideas and building systems with innovations. Over a quarter of the century, Henry and his team continue to journey through the endeavour of exploring and exploiting VR, to enable people to enjoy and live a better life in the virtual world. Henry always enjoys being with students and he is currently teaching engineering at Oxford University and developing high performance engineering team at the Remote Applications in Challenging Environment (RACE), a national lab specialising in robotics