MIT Reality Hack 2024

January 2024

Once again the most life-changing weekend of my life. I am now three for three on XR hackathon wins. I worked with four of my closest friends from my VRChat friend group and won Grand Finalist (top 10) out of over 500 participants and won the "Enhanced Learning" track out of 23 teams. 

In short, we built an educational fire escape safety training app that lets you practice escaping your own home with helpful tips and fire and smoke that is procedurally placed throughout your space. I knew coming in that I wanted to work with the new Meta APIs because that's what I usually like to do with hackathons, so our original inspiration was using the Depth API to let you navigate your space blind or with interesting depth-based visuals. But, we pivoted because we couldn't find a good problem that would solve. We then came up with the idea that depth buffers look kind of like smoke, and spent a good portion of our time making and troubleshooting custom shaders that make Unity's built-in fog system work with Meta's passthrough API! I found it very unique to make a mixed reality experience that purposefully obscures your vision a couple of feet in front of you. The result was the best and most (relatively) polished hackathon project I've ever made!

I was the team lead and was responsible for some of the brainstorming and vision of the project. I also set up the project with Meta's Depth, Scene, and hand tracking APIs and did the majority of reading documentation to understand, troubleshoot, and communicate to the team how to work with them and their limitations. With all that in consideration, DJ was still the MVP and everyone on the team contributed a significant amount, so I am incredibly grateful for that.

Apart from the project, this event meant an indescribable amount to me because I got the chance to hang out with my ICXR (Intercollegiate XR Club) VRChat friend group that I've spent hours every Saturday night with for almost a year for five days straight in-person for the first time. I didn't even know what some of their faces looked like, so it was a very interesting and jarring experience. Meeting everyone else who I talk to so much on the ICXR Discord in-person was amazing as well, and we were incredibly loud in a sushi restaurant with our party boats. Every second of this event was incredible.

Devpost linked here:

https://devpost.com/software/a-fire-training-app