Microsoft will hand out $500K to these five HoloLens grant winners

Microsoft put out the call this summer for innovative, academic applications using its HoloLens augmented reality headset, offering $100,000 and two dev kits each to five winning universities. Today, Microsoft named the victorious schools, ranging from Carnegie Mellon University to Clackamas Community College. The winners include a program aimed at "augmenting reality for the visually impaired" and two projects that rely on open-source or collaborative data analysis -- in AR, of course. Plus, Microsoft said it received too many great ideas to stop at five, so it's handing out two dev kits to an additional five universities. The runners-up include a project called "DinoLens" (yes, please), a program focused on helping humans perceive ultraviolet and ultrasonic waves and an app for stroke rehabilitation. Check out the full list of winners below.

Winners:

• Golan Levin, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO, Carnegie Mellon University: Open-Source Investigations in Mixed Reality

• Emily Cooper, Wojciech Jarosz and Xing-Dong Yang, Dartmouth College:Augmenting Reality for the Visually Impaired with Microsoft HoloLens

• Joseph Gabbard and Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech: Collaborative Analysis of Large-scale Mixed Reality Data

• Andy Mingo, Tawny Schlieski, Nikki Dunsire, Shelley Midthun, J Bills, Clackamas Community College & Intel, HoloLens Curriculum for Trade-based Education

• Allen Yang, Professor Claire Tomlin, and Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley: Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command System (ISAACS)

Runners-up:

• Lori C. Walters, Eileen Smith, Fran Blumberg, Robert Michlowitz, Alexia Mandeville, University of Central Florida: Memory Lens: A Dynamic Tool for Capturing Societal Memory

• Wen Liu, The University of Kansas: Stroke Rehabilitation

• Preeti Gupta, American Museum of Natural History: DinoLens: Seeing an Unseen Past

• Pamela Jennings, Center for Design Innovation: CONSTRUKTS: Augmenting design processes with interactive holograms using the Microsoft HoloLens

• Carol LaFayette and Frederic I. Parke, Texas A&M University: Extending the range of human senses: Ultraviolet and ultrasonic perception with Microsoft HoloLens

[Image credit: Microsoft]