EON Reality Launches Global XR Creation Competition with $50K Worth of Prizes

Contest to serve as a vehicle to spread awareness about knowledge metaverse and EON-XR updates.

EON Reality’s Spatial Meetings product in action. (Picture courtesy of EON Reality.)

EON Reality is working to grant access to virtual and augmented reality tools to people worldwide for education, skill acquisition and workforce training with a library of over a million hardware-agnostic AR/VR assets, or what is being referred to as XR. In line with this effort, EON has kicked off a global XR creation competition where users can use EON’s new suite of products to create XR experiences. It’s part of the company’s broader move, including starting a research grant program to make XR-based learning mainstream. 

The contest involves using one of EON’s three products: EON-XR, Merged XR, or Spatial Meetings, to design an XR experience that will be added to EON’s shared XR knowledge metaverse. Contestants also have the option to create a lesson for using one of the three EON products.

Applications of the EON product line cover various industries, including healthcare, education, manufacturing, aerospace and transportation. For example, EON’s Merged XR has been used for energy conservation and reliability, including to help train technicians to deal with power failures during heatwaves. Other applications include boiler maintenance training, operating room training and robotics manufacturing, among many others.

Once the XR experience is created, contestants can capture, import, or scan it to EON-XR and create a lesson. The next step is to create a 120-second video to highlight the lesson showing the experience from an AR perspective within a relevant real-life environment. For example, a video for an XR experience lesson featuring boat maintenance would be recorded on a dock or beach setting. Submissions are expected to include 3D recordings, navigational guidance, information annotations and interactive elements such as quizzes.

Regarding what specific types of XR environments, objects and activities make eligible contest entries, EON gives participants broad latitude for their submissions. The hope is to elicit diverse and detailed experiences for any given subject matter and capture the experiences of the world. Some of these various applications to date include teleportation to the Bagan Temple in Myanmar, an archaeological study of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in Colorado and a guided tour of Pesaro, Italy.

Any competition worth its salt comes with incentives. As such, EON will offer about $50,000 worth of prizes for contest winners. The awards include a Magic Leap headset, lifetime subscription to EON-XR and more. 

The timing of the competition aligns with EON’s plans to expand its XR creation reach. The competition will help bolster its library of XR assets that make up a metaverse of digital knowledge from diverse sources globally. The EON Reality team will review all submissions to determine strong candidates for showcasing in the metaverse library. 

Concurrent to the competition, EON has also started a research grant program to fund XR projects. The program will accept applications from academic facilities pursuing research into areas such as digital twin IoT, safety and security systems such as for hazmat and radiation and campus-wide mass XR deployment. EON will cover almost 99% of the funding required to deploy a research center involving 5,000 students and 750 employees or interns for up to five years. In addition, the program seeks to build on the success of EON’s Grant Guarantee Program that’s by invitation only. Qualified candidates must submit an online application to be considered for the grant program. Both the grant program and competition are geared to contribute to the knowledge metaverse.