Earlier this year, XPRIZE announced a new challenge: a four-year global competition to “develop real life avatars,” with a US $10 million prize sponsored by All Nippon Airways (ANA). We like robot challenges, especially robot challenges with prizes big enough to attract top-notch competition, and the idea of creating remote presence systems that can do more than just send back video is a compelling one, with all kinds of potential use cases.

However, our first reaction to the sample of potential challenge scenarios published by XPRIZE was that they weren’t nearly difficult and compelling enough, meaning that the challenge wouldn’t promote the kind of cutting-edge innovation that we (and presumably XPRIZE) would like to see. To their credit, XPRIZE has put a lot of work into incorporating feedback from a variety of experts based on those initial guidelines, and today they are releasing a revised version of the challenge guidelines that have been completely recalibrated for a more difficult and long-term relevant challenge that we’re now super excited for.