Career
1949 to 1952 After graduating from MIT, Howlett supported himself and a wife and daughter by creating his first enterprise, repairing TV sets in the home, and by designing and building electronic prototypes—one of which had a proximity detector that caused a dummy to talk to you in a store when you walked up to it.
1952 to 1957 Staff member at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory working on cross-correlation radar.
1957 to 1960 General Electric heavy military electronics in Syracuse, NY, as an engineer, traveling worldwide to trouble shoot and educate operators of an early warning radar system. (BMEWS)
1960 Returned to Boston to become Marketing Manager of Adage, Incorporated, eventually assuming the roles of engineering manager and director of research.
Howlett's second enterprise was a mail-order business, wherein he launched dozens of products on the New York Times mail order page, one of which (a plastic organizer tray) was successful (made a profit), but it was not profitable enough. In 1962, he went to work as Marketing Manager for Di/An Controls, inc. a Boston manufacturer of space-borne magnetic memories.
1964 to 1968 Founder and president of NUMEX, a company based on a novel high quality numerical projection readout device that was made obsolete by segmented displays.
1968-1978 Consulting, prototyping and light manufacturing of optics and electronics for Boston-area firms.
1978 Invented an extremely wide angle stereoscopic photographic system based on camera lenses that introduced aberrations on the film to neutralize aberrations required in the viewer to get the extremely wide field. A patent for the system and method, called by the trade name LEEP, issued in 1983.
1980 to 1990 Operated a proprietorship, POP-OPTIX LABS with revenue from consulting and manufacture of custom optical and electronic devices. Promotion and some sales of the LEEP system during this period led to the use of the LEEP optics in theme park attractions and almost all of the Virtual Reality Headsets (Head-Mounted Displays, or HMDs) sold in the ‘80s and until manufacturers gave up on truly wide Field of View in the ‘90s.
1991 Founded and operated LEEP Systems, Inc. to address the market for complete wide angle Telepresence and Virtual Reality systems for research and for medical and military purposes.
2006 Co-founded LeepVR, Ltd. with his son, Alex.
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