Facsimile Appearance to Create Energy Savings (FACES)

The summary for the Facsimile Appearance to Create Energy Savings (FACES) grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Facsimile Appearance to Create Energy Savings (FACES): The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), an organization within the Department of Energy (DOE), is chartered by Congress in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-69), as amended by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358) to: “(A) to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in— (i) reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources; (ii) reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and (iii) improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors; and (B) to ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.” 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.