The power of technology is that there are many ways to achieve a given outcome. At the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals – the first live finals held by XPRIZE since 2004 – teams from around the world put their distinct robotic avatars head-to-head for the grand prize. “What struck me was how different everybody’s solutions were,” says Avatar XPRIZE technical lead Jacki Morie, who was there in Long Beach California at the Finals on the day. 

She puts the team’s many approaches down to the fact that we are only at very the beginning of avatar technology – a technology that will one day let us connect, share our critical skills, and explore new places remotely, as though we were there in the flesh. This meant that, venturing into this new realm of technology over the last four years of the Prize, teams discovered there was no “off-the-shelf solution”. Instead, they had to use their knowledge from their respective fields of expertise – from haptics to robotics to designing operating systems – in order to build their robots. 

“They all developed their avatar systems in their own neck of the woods, with input from their own fields, meaning no two robots were alike,” says Morie. What’s exciting, she adds, is the directions these new technologies will go in – in both the near and distant future.