Announcing the 2024 Presence Platform Digital Hackathon Winners

Since the earliest days of mixed reality (MR) with monoscopic Passthrough on Meta Quest 2, we’ve been blown away by the ingenuity of the Meta Quest developer community in pushing innovative use cases, developing new mechanics, and delivering magical MR experiences.

Despite all the great strides in expanding what’s possible with Meta Quest, we know this is just the beginning. We’re excited to provide you with fresh opportunities to drive further innovation and explore untapped potential across a myriad of MR use cases—or create brand-new ones. That’s why we challenged you to hone your MR development skills in our Presence Platform Digital Hackathon, which concluded last month.

Judged by leading XR experts Dilmer, Valem, Justin Barnett, Rahel Demant, and Dinesh Punni, this hackathon tasked developers to use at least one core MR capability (e.g Passthrough, Scene, Spatial Anchors, Mesh, or Depth) and one Presence Platform SDK to develop a brand new MR experience for one of the following app categories:

Over 2,000 participants entered this hackathon to enhance their skills, flesh out new ideas, and pursue prizes totaling $30K. Now that all submissions are in, our judges have spoken, and votes have been tallied, so let’s dive into this year’s Presence Platform Digital Hackathon winners.

Taking inspiration from the arcade classic Puzzle Bobble and real-world games like billiards, Liam Mason’s Blobble transforms people’s physical space into an interactive experience in which players try to connect identically colored balls together across their room to create bigger “blobbles.”

Blobble’s use of Scene enables a delightfully fun MR environment that provides accurate collisions for players to position and launch balls across their space. Players can anticipate the trajectory of balls to strategically collide and bounce them between furniture and walls—similar to the edges of a pool table.

One of the biggest challenges in creating Blobble was developing an ideal method of launching balls across a player’s room. Using Interaction SDK and Building Blocks, Mason was able to provide players with greater accessibility through the ability to pinch, pull, and release balls from nearly any angle, enabling a canvas for players to be creative in how they try to create blobbles, while also delivering a dynamic experience that’s unique to every room environment.

When discussing the challenges in creating an engaging and accessible MR experience, Mason emphasizes the importance of repeated testing. “What is seen in the editor is not always the same as a deployed build,” says Mason. “Additionally iterating on interactions is important an idea may not work or may run into a problem, with MR it's important to test in a multitude of different environments. Fortunately for me, I had a room with a high ceiling so it quickly became apparent that the interaction system needed to change."

Alireza Bahremand, Auryan Ratliff, and Brayden Jenkins’ Flaivor provides a blueprint for developers looking to explore lifestyle use cases that merge MR capabilities with AI to create an app experience that can enrich everyday activities.

Flaivor delivers an intuitive and hands-on MR cooking experience perfect for anyone exploring new recipes or getting creative in the kitchen. Flaivor’s use of Passthrough enables people to prepare ingredients and maneuver around their physical kitchen with ease, while the app’s use of OpenAI API enables Martha, an AI assistant, to support people by providing real-time feedback and suggestions on the way to creating the perfect dish.

Combining AI with the use of Voice SDK gives people the flexibility to either take a snapshot of ingredients or use voice commands to provide input to Martha, who will whip up tailored recipes in real time that are individualized based on the provided ingredients. The app’s ability to instantly provide cooking tips, timers, and its adaptable ingredient recognition system based on visual or spoken inputs are unique technical achievements that have the power to make cooking more personalized, informative, and fun.

When reflecting on lessons learned throughout the development process, the team noted the unique challenges when merging a wide set of advanced capabilities. “Building Flaivor was a crash course in integrating complex technologies. We had to figure out how to make AI understand and assist with cooking without frustrating users with tech jargon or clumsy interactions. The project sharpened our skills in designing user-friendly interfaces and taught us a lot about real-time computing challenges.”

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to shrink down and experience the magic of a snow globe from the inside? Binto K Bino’s Dreamscape does exactly that by bringing the best of MR and VR together to open up nearly endless possibilities to build enchanting, miniature virtual worlds in a 3D physical space with Passthrough, and unlocking the ability to immerse yourself fully within your creation.

Inspired by the charm and imaginative characteristics of snow globes, Dreamscape gives people an intuitive interface to tailor serene environments in the palm of their hands using Hand Tracking and Interaction SDK. Rather than manually starting from scratch, people can also leverage generative AI to create worlds using written or voice prompts thanks to the app’s use of OpenAI API and Voice SDK. People can simply type or speak their prompt, and the app will generate a world in seconds that can be easily modified and stylized to create something unique and magical.

As an early use case combining design-based apps with AI in an MR experience, Bino’s Dreamscape provides a blueprint for developers looking for ways to help people unlock their imagination using AI. “One of the main challenges was the integration of generative AI, which involved fine-tuning the AI model with datasets from Unity scenes—an endeavor that required significant time and effort,” says Binto. “Just by inputting a prompt describing what you would like to see, the Gen AI assist correctly instantiates and arranges the models with appropriate scale, and position on top of the surface.”

These magical experiences provide a glimpse into the innovation fueled by digital hackathons, and you can take a deeper dive into the breadth of app submissions here to find inspiration for your next MR project.

If you missed out on this hackathon, more are coming up this year. See below for a few of the upcoming events where you can sharpen your Meta Quest development skills and begin to build the next generation of MR Quest applications:

XR Creator Con, Berlin, June 27 - 30 - XRCC is an event coordinated with Immersive insiders and Meta that brings together 150+ of Europe's best XR talents for 4 days of creation, learning, and networking.

Global XR Hack, (London, UK August 14-16, Gamescom, Cologne, August 18-20, Istanbul, Turkey September 6-8, Stockholm, Sweden September 6-8) - Spanning 4 different cities, the Global XR Hack is the first multi-location XR hackathon, uniting experts to advance the frontiers of XR and AI technology.

Meta and AWS Presence Platform Hackathon, Palo Alto, August 26 - 28 - three action-packed days of innovation, exploration, and limitless possibilities in the world of mixed reality.

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