A multidisciplinary team developing an immersive avatar system that enables remote human connection has advanced to the semifinals for the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition.
XPRIZE announced on April 5 that 38 teams from 16 countries were selected out of 77 qualified contestants, including the Human Fusions team composed of engineers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and researchers from four other U.S. universities.
Led by Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) biomedical engineers, the Human Fusions avatar’s core technology is designed to allow humans to be physically in one place and experientially in another. The team entered its trademarked NeuroReality platform and the UCLA-built, health care Sensa avatar for the four-year competition launched in 2018.
Veronica Santos, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA Samueli, leads the team in the…
