TEMPE, Ariz. — A team of ASU students won $500,000 after inventing a new kind of facemask that won't fog up glasses.
The competition was sponsored by the X Prize Foundation, which looks for innovative solutions to the world's problems.
The team of students from ASU's Luminosity Lab developed a two-chamber system that forces air from the nose and mouth out the front of the mask, instead of out the top and under a person's glasses.
“Still can’t believe it," student Katie Sue Pascavis said. "We couldn’t have done it without everyone’s support.”
The X Prize competition gave teams from around the world an assignment: improve the facemask.
Some teams made it transparent, others developed interchangeable filters for it. But the ASU team focused on solving a problem people have been complaining about since the pandemic began.
"We took a lot of different designs we had seen in the wild and pulled all of these ideas together," student John Patterson said.
And, because of the pandemic that inspired the challenge, the team worked remotely. Some members said they haven't actually met the others in person yet.
"Apart from the occasional handoff of a prototype," Patterson said," We really did everything over Zoom."
The team now gets $500,000 to try and turn their prototype into a mass-produced product.
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