ARPA-E: Enhancements in Facsimile Appearance to Create Energy Savings (FACES) Grant

Accordingly this modification,

• Inserted certain deadlines, including the deadlines for submitting questions and Full Applications. See Cover Page and Required Documents Checklist.
• Revised the following sections of the FOA to provide guidance on required application forms and the content and form of Full Applications and Replies to Reviewer Comments: Required Documents Checklist and Sections IV.D, IV.E, and IV.G of the FOA. Applicants are strongly encouraged to use the templates provided on ARPA‐E eXCHANGE (https://arpa‐e‐foa.energy.gov).
• Inserted criteria that ARPA‐E will use to evaluate Full Applications, see Section V.A.2 of the FOA.
• Inserted criteria that ARPA‐E will use to evaluate Replies to Reviewer Comments in Section V.A.3 of the FOA.
• Inserted information on the anticipated announcement and award dates, see Section V.C of the FOA.
• Inserted information concerning Full Application Notifications, see Section VI.A.3 of the FOA.
• Inserted Administrative and National Policy Requirements, see Section VI.B of the FOA.
• Inserted Reporting Requirements, see Section VI.C of the FOA.
• Clarified timeframe and FAQ response location under Communications with ARPA-E, see Section VII.A of the FOA.
• Revised language for Rights in Technical Data, see Section VIII.H of the FOA.

• Provided clarification on third party evaluation for Categories 1 and 2, see Section I.F of the FOA.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider concept papers or full applications submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider concept papers submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx)

ARPA-E issues this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) under the programmatic authorizing statute codified at 42 U.S.C. § 16538. The FOA and any awards made under this FOA are subject to 2 C.F.R. Part 200 as amended by 2 C.F.R. Part 910.

ARPA-E funds research on and the development of high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. The agency focuses on technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a modest investment over a defined period of time in order to catalyze the translation from scientific discovery to early-stage technology. For the latest news and information about ARPA-E, its programs and the research projects currently supported, see: http://arpa-e.energy.gov/.

The objective of the FACES Program is to develop advanced information technologies which will dramatically reduce the need to travel for the purpose of communication, thereby reducing travel-related energy consumption and its associated greenhouse gas emissions, as well as increasing the efficiency of energy use and improving economic security.

Telecommunication technology has advanced significantly since the invention of the telegraph, yet we are still far from this ideal. Today’s telecommunication technologies still lack essential characteristics demanded by human interaction. ARPA-E believes that extraordinary technological shifts over the past two decades have created an opportunity to dramatically improve the utility of telecommunication technology.

This digital form of transportation has the potential to reduce communication-related travel energy consumption by several orders of magnitude because information networks consume substantially less energy than all traditional forms of transportation (such as planes, trains, and automobiles). Travel for the purpose of in-person communication is responsible for roughly 8% of the United States’ energy consumption, so the ultimate success of this Program could yield a reduction in energy consumption of several quadrillion BTUs per year in the US alone.

Of essential importance is that an individual would prefer to use the “digital transportation” Technologies developed under the FACES Program rather than the energy-, time-, and cost-intensive status quo of physical travel, thereby providing a substantial incentive for market adoption. If the FACES Program is successful, the United States will benefit from the positive externalities of decreased dependence on petroleum and therefore increased energy security, decreased energy-related emissions, and increased efficiency of communication-related energy expenditure.

To achieve these goals, the FACES Technologies must provide an experience that meets or exceeds the current benefits of in-person interactions. ARPA-E believes that technical advances in computer technology, sensors, displays, computer graphics, and information networks, all of which have changed the world in their own right, will allow this high-quality communication across any distance.

The FACES Program will focus on communication systems employing “Digital Humans”. A Digital Human (DH) is a bandwidth-efficient, three-dimensional digital representation of a person that is nearly indistinguishable from the communication partner in real life.

These DH communication systems must provide highly natural and immersive communication that is preferable to physically travelling, and have the potential to be very low cost in their implementation so that the average person can afford to communicate in this way. ARPA-E has identified three critical elements to developing DH communication systems as means of decreasing energy consumption (note: the following is a summary – the Technical Categories of Interest in Subsection E, and Performance Targets in Subsection F, below are controlling for application submissions):

1. ARPA-E seeks advances in real-time motion capture and digitization of the full human form, coupled with the real-time reconstruction and display of the resultant full human likeness at the other end of an information network, yielding an audiovisually-realistic DH-based digital transportation platform.

2. ARPA-E seeks innovative, complementary advances in the requisite Technology components of real-time capture, digitization, reconstruction, and other related hardware and software tools deemed necessary for or conducive to digital transportation.

3. ARPA-E seeks innovative studies of travel-replacement thresholds, new metrics for realism and immersion of telecommunications systems, and for systematic evaluation of DH technologies.

FACES Technologies will be subject to rigorous and quantitative evaluation metrics, and must demonstrate progress towards meeting travel-replacement thresholds. The development and use of the travel-replacement thresholds for digital transportation will be an important contribution of this Program.