PAR Works Enhances $25,000 Developer Competition to Encourage Innovative Ideas

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Precision Augmented Reality Works Inc. (“PAR Works”), an award-winning subsidiary of Allied Minds Inc. that has developed the market’s fastest and most accurate augmented reality mobile software, announced today an enhanced Developer Competition for its AR platform that makes it easier for individuals with innovative applications – and concepts for applications – to submit their best ideas.

“We know there are some great applications waiting out there”

The company, based in Boston, is simplifying the categories for entries to two from three: The first category offers a prize of $15,000 for the best submission of a fully developed application. The second category awards the winning applicant $10,000 for the best new application concept for the PAR Works AR platform, and is oriented toward a broader segment of the technology community, including marketers, business managers, entrepreneurs and others who enjoy thinking up new applications for emerging technologies. The total prize money for the contest remains unchanged from the previously announced $25,000.

As consumers and businesses increase their use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, their appetite for on-demand content is growing exponentially. PAR Works offers an advanced computer vision analysis process that lets smart-device owners use images to retrieve customized, tagged information on any arbitrary building, product, street scene or object.

Based upon research developed by renowned engineers at Virginia Tech, PAR Works’ technology can achieve millimeter-level accuracy with processing times of about one second, definitively surpassing the capabilities of other augmented reality software technologies developed to date. The technology has received international acclaim, being named an International CES Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Awards honoree by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® in the U.S., as well as a winner of “Best Paper Award” at the 12^th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR2012) in Taipei last November.

The company is now working to develop applications for its technology, and created the competition to encourage others to join it in generating new ideas for applications.

“We have a game-changing AR platform with a host of potential applications across many different sectors, and we believe the best ideas for how to use our technology will come from people working in them,” said Dr. Jules White, co-founder and Chief Scientist for PAR Works. “We want our developer competition to give people from a variety of backgrounds — from application developers to business managers and marketers — the opportunity to take our tech and find ways to use it in ways that no one has thought of yet.”

Under the enhanced guidelines for the competition, the complete application development category is geared toward skilled mobile application developers. Applicants have to create an innovative application in either Android or iOS with the potential to either be useful and attractive to a large number of end-users, and/or create a transformation in efficiency and effectiveness in a given industry.

Using the API tools available on the competition site, applicants must also create this application in a usable beta form and upload his or her work to the competition servers. Their work must be entirely original and provide step-by-step instructions on how to develop and operate the application. Complete details are available at http://www.parworks.com/?q=competition.

Applicants of the concepts category must create an application idea with the potential to either be useful and attractive to a large number of end-users, and/or create a transformation in efficiency and effectiveness in a given industry. Applicants will use an existing PAR Works application to augment images and otherwise show how their concept would potentially work when fully developed. Complete details are available at http://www.parworks.com/?q=competition.

The final deadline for submissions in both categories is March 15, 2013. Those concepts and applications submitted before February 12, 2013 will be given feedback by the PAR Works team within 30 days. PAR Works reserves the right to highlight a submission from this group of early entrants at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

The company is excited about the potential for the competition to generate new ideas and applications for its technology. More than 220 developers have already registered for the competition to date, and great ideas are already flowing in, according to Dr. Yu Sun, Director of Engineering for PAR Works. “We know there are some great applications waiting out there,” Sun said. “We can’t wait to share them with the world.”

About PAR Works

PAR Works brings augmented reality to a new level, offering digital imagery overlay accuracy to the ground-breaking precision of millimeters, all performed nearly instantaneously on any arbitrary mobile device. PAR Works technology is based on research developed by Dr. Jules White, Dr. Mani Golparvar-Fard, and Mr. Hyojoon Bae at Virginia Tech. For a product demo, please visit www.parworks.com.

About Allied Minds

Allied Minds is a U.S. investment firm that deploys private equity to form, fund, manage and build start-ups based on early-stage technologies developed at renowned U.S. universities and federal research institutions. Allied Minds serves as a diversified holding company that supports its businesses with capital, management and shared services, and is the premier investment firm to utilize this novel and fully integrated approach to technology commercialization. More information about the Boston-based company can be found at www.alliedminds.com.