At some point in the not-too-distant future, pairing depth-sensing cameras with artificial intelligence will enable computers to truly understand the physical world — a vision researchers and companies have spent years working to transform into reality. Today, open source computer vision library OpenCV announced that it’s celebrating its 20th anniversary with a global competition designed to spur practical innovations in spatial AI. The company said it will award 1,200 depth-sensing cameras and cash prizes to help entrants prototype their projects.

Backed by Intel and Microsoft Azure, the OpenCV AI Competition consists of two phases: Phase 1 requires a team to identify a real-world AI problem that can be solved over a three-month period with OpenCV’s latest neural inference depth camera, OAK-D. In Phase 2, each of the top 210 teams will receive either four or 10 OAK-D cameras, as well as 100 hours of free Azure computing time, access to Intel’s Dev Cloud, and OpenCV Slack support, all for the purpose of actually solving the identified AI problem. OpenCV will award $5,000-$20,000 prizes to the top three projects globally, plus three $2,000-$5,000 regional prizes across each of six competition regions and $2,000 regional popular vote prizes.