Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light fields (REVEAL) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light fields (REVEAL) opportunity was a DARPA Defense Sciences Office (DSO) research solicitation aimed at pushing optical imaging and sensing far beyond conventional approaches. The core idea is to explore how light can be measured, manipulated, and interpreted in richer ways by leveraging "high dimensional" properties of optical fields, not just simple intensity images. In practice, this points toward research that can capture and exploit multiple degrees of freedom carried by photons and their propagation pathways, potentially including aspects like phase, polarization, wavelength dependence, coherence, temporal structure, spatial modes, angular information, correlations, and other field properties that standard imaging systems often ignore or average out. The goal is not incremental tuning of existing cameras or sensors, but fundamentally new methods that change what is possible in visibility, imaging, or sensing.

DARPA framed REVEAL as a call for innovative proposals that can produce revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. That emphasis matters: the solicitation explicitly excludes research whose main outcome would be evolutionary improvements to the current state of practice. In other words, proposals needed to demonstrate a credible path to step-change capability rather than modest performance gains. The scope also highlights "across all photon pathways," signaling interest in techniques that account for complex light transport, scattering, multipath propagation, and other real-world effects that typically degrade imaging performance, especially in challenging environments. Conceptually, this could include active approaches where illumination is structured, modulated, or otherwise engineered, and then the returned light is captured in a way that preserves more of its information content so that computational or physical processing can recover details that would otherwise be hidden.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity was released as DARPA BAA 15-44 under the Defense Sciences Office. It was categorized as discretionary funding and supported multiple funding instruments, including cooperative agreements, other procurement contracts, and standard procurement contracts, reflecting flexibility in how DARPA could structure awards depending on the performer and the nature of the work. It fell under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category and used CFDA number 12.910 (Research and Technology Development). There was no cost sharing or matching requirement, which typically lowers barriers for proposers by not requiring them to contribute additional non-federal funds.

Eligibility was listed as unrestricted, meaning the solicitation was broadly open to a wide range of organizations (for example, companies, universities, nonprofits, and other entities), subject to any further clarification that might have appeared in the full announcement. The posting date and creation date were May 22, 2015, with an original and current closing date of July 30, 2015. The opportunity was archived on August 29, 2015, indicating it is no longer accepting submissions. For access issues, DARPA provided a point of contact through the BAA Coordinator associated with DARPA BAA 15-44, and the full announcement was hosted via the DSO solicitation website linked in the opportunity materials.

Overall, REVEAL was positioned as a high-risk, high-reward DARPA effort focused on next-generation optical visibility: extracting more actionable information from light by measuring and using its full field structure and complex propagation behavior, and doing so in a way that yields genuinely new sensing or imaging capabilities rather than incremental refinements of existing optical systems.

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