The Hollywood director James Cameron is donating the craft that he built and last year rode into the sea’s deepest spot to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as part of a new collaboration meant to speed ocean exploration, the partners announced early Tuesday.

The undersea craft, which cost Mr. Cameron, the maker of hit movies like “Titanic” and “Avatar,” roughly $10 million of his own money, will be used mainly to aid the design of advanced vehicles and technologies, rather than for routinely carrying scientists into the sea’s depths.

The announcement comes on the first anniversary of Mr. Cameron’s solo dive through the dark waters of the western Pacific. Down nearly seven miles, he and his torpedolike vehicle came to rest at the bottom of the Challenger Deep — the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the deepest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. (A Twitter message that was posted from his dive was hailed as one of the top social media events of 2012.)

No other vehicle can carry people down so deep, and ocean engineers praise the craft, which was designed by Mr. Cameron and a team in Australia, for its innovative features. Most notably, its vertical design lets it dive rapidly and sets it apart from the world’s submersibles and submarines, which typically look like underwater ships and are optimized for horizontal travel.