NEW YORK, NY, Dec 9, 2022 – AWE, the world’s oldest and largest community of augmented reality and virtual reality professionals, seeks submissions by December 31, 2022 from global teams to compete for a $100,000 cash prize to fight climate change; using XR-based technologies, platforms and content. The XR Prize is fully committed to an open competition where anyone with a great idea can participate.
The XR Prize Challenge is a global competition harnessing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) solutions, collectively referred to as XR, to help fight climate change. AWE is inviting submissions from teams and individuals, and especially collaborations between XR technologists and climate change experts from around the world to compete for the $100,000cash prize awarded to the best submission demonstrating a creative, functional, and impactful XR-based solution to help humanity in our fight against climate change.
The winning team will be announced at AWE 2023 in Santa Clara, CA on June 1, 2023 and presented with their prize money by AWE co-founder Ori Inbar at a gala Award event.
Full details may be found at https://www.awexr.com/xrprize with entries from companies, educational institutions, students, passionate individual developers as well as teams composed of all of the above.
Solutions will be judged on the total creativity, functionality, and impact of the entry to help humanity in our fight against the scourge of climate change in these 4 categories:
- Replacing Wasteful Material Practices
- Visualizing The Causes & Impacts Of Climate Change
- Educating About Solutions To Climate Change
- Optimizing Design & Execution Of Climate Solutions
A one-hour webinar on Thursday December 8 at 09:00 PST, hosted at www.awe.live, is open to any and all potential partners, participants and curious individuals to learn more. The webinar will also be recorded and available for viewing after the initial live broadcast for those whose timezone does not lend itself easily to participation.
Metaverse partner companies make XR prize equitable, accessible.
In order to make the XR Prize Challenge: Fight Climate Change as equitable and accessible as possible to a diverse population of participants (including non-technical teams), AWE has partnered with a host of leading-edge XR technical and platform partners. They will all be offering no-barrier access to their leading XR tools, hardware, and services for use in the MVP prototyping portion of the competition.
Technical partners generously donating solutions to participating XR Challenge teams include:
- Arkio, Blippar, BundlAR, echo3D, Epson Moverio, Microsoft – StereoKit, Mixed Reality Toolkit, MetaVRse, Mozilla Hubs, PlugXR, Wonderland Engine, Zappar
Experts in sustainability providing coaching office hours:
To provide all competing teams with the most acclaimed cross-disciplinary counsel, a number of expert mentors in climate science, sustainability, and metaverse technologies have also generously donated their time to the Challenge.
Expert coaches include: Dr. Danny Pimentel, University of Oregon; Daniel Hartz, Sustainability Champions; Monica Wright, Noso Environmental; and Rick Davis, Lastbulb. Their full bios may be read at https://www.awexr.com/xrprize-mentors.
“There is truly no more important collective challenge facing humanity today than climate change – and XR is the ideal technology platform to try and develop creative solutions to address it,” said Ori Inbar, co-founder of AWE.
Additional background on The XR Prize:
The challenge:
Climate change is one of the most urgent and long-term threats to life as we know it, and deserves our attention as a species, as professionals, and as technology experts. While the causes and effects of climate change are understood intellectually, they are difficult to grasp viscerally or emotionally because they seem so disconnected from our daily lives and behaviors. One of the biggest challenges in raising awareness of the impacts of climate change is that it is hard to fight a threat you can’t see.
Additionally, while there are communities and communication platforms for those who wish to address climate change, these forums are often not as powerful as immersive solutions for educating people through direct and personal experience. Climate change subject matter experts and entrepreneurs struggle to inspire people and policy-makers to take action. Finally, engineers and other professionals need spatially immersive tools to help improve and optimize design and execution for solutions to fight climate change.
The opportunity:
XR, a technology that encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, is the ultimate tool to visualize information and generate empathy through immersive story-telling and spatial experiences. In recent years, XR has had a positive impact on the world thanks to its potential to mitigate climate change. Whether by reducing the need to travel, reducing manufacturing and product waste, or even reducing the need for real estate spaces, XR technology is helping numerous industries fight climate change. However, the XR industry can and should do much more! XR’s strength is to help simulate and visualize the invisible and make the problem of climate change personal to every individual.
About Augmented World Expo
AWE (Augmented World Expo) is the world’s leading AR+VR conference and expo with events in the USA, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. AWE events consistently bring together a mix of CEOs, CTOs, designers, developers, creative agencies, futurists, analysts, investors and top press in a unique opportunity to learn, inspire, partner and experience firsthand one of the most exciting industries of their times.
For more information, visit www.awexr.com.