Nixie Wearable Drone Camera Wins First Intel 'Make It Wearable' Competition $500K Grand Prize

At CES this past January, Intel talked more about wearables than anything else. It became immediately clear that the company was done playing games, and didn't want to fall behind in such a lucrative market. To help give its progress in the wearable game a massive boost, the company announced at that time a competition, 'Make It Wearable', allowing anyone to submit their Intel Edison-based concept and hope to score a big prize.

Initially, Intel was hit with 500 entries, which eventually became 40. At that point, even Intel CEO Brian Krzanich pored over those 40 to help whittle them down to 10. It goes without saying, but within that final ten was some serious competition.

Ultimately, the team that won the competition, and the $500,000, is Nixie, which hopes to mass-produce a wearable drone camera. If that product sounds a little familiar, it's probably because you remember our post about it in late September. The general consensus from our team and readers alike was that it's extremely cool, so it's great to see that Intel agreed.

With such a cash infusion, let's hope that final Nixie products won't take that long to come to market.

Nixie wasn't the only winner here, though; two others were chosen for smaller prizes. In second place, and the winner of $200,000, is Open Bionics, a project that aims to produce extremely low-cost but very robust robotic hands with the help of 3D printing.

In third place, with a $100,000 prize, is ProGlove, which as it sounds is a glove you wear that can display a range of information on a small screen affixed to the top. With sensors in the fingertips, this display could warn the user when they're too close to a hot object (eg: working inside of a car's hood), or even be able to scan a product code on-the-fly while transporting it from one spot to another. At first, ProGlove is targeting those in the workplace that wear gloves already, to help them improve their efficiency.

If you're interested in learning about the seven other Make It Wearable finalists, I'd recommend heading here. While those seven didn't walk away with a prize, it seems extremely likely that all of the products will still see a release at some point.