Winning the Reality Hack in my heart
sponsoring MIT's Reality Hackathon and finding my XR family
Last year I went to the MIT Reality Hackathon for the first time and it changed my life and career.
I learned I could develop XR software better than I thought I could, I made friends, and my team were finalist, and won a category. The hackathon was when I realized that the XR community was my home, these were the devs and designers just like me.
We’re a diverse, eclectic bunch of nerds that wear our hearts on our sleeves and geek out about making 3D, immersive environments.
Between last hack and this hack, in late summer I started a company, CyberHub Syndicate, with Justin Barnett and we began building Foundry - our product for VR developers.
We hired a young, talented developer - Joe - who cranked out 90% of the V1 of Foundry. Shortly before the hack we hired a seasoned pro, Richard - who I met on Twitter, to whip the product into shape.
This year at the hack we came as sponsors and mentors.
We had our own mini hackathon getting the GitHub repo into shape for the hack.
We landed Wednesday night and stayed late pushing updates and testing. Thursday while hackers were in workshops we were demoing Foundry and pushing updates to the repo in between demos.
We pushed the repo public at 11:37 PM in a bar near campus while the hackers were in team formation.
The next morning, the first official morning of hacking, we eagerly refreshed the page over and over again, watching as first 2, then 3, 4, 5, 6 teams began forking the repo.
Over Friday and Saturday and part of Sunday we mentored a handful of teams using Foundry for the hack - each incredible project distinct from the others.
When the semi-finalists were announced, two of the teams using Foundry got in. Then one into the finals.
I felt like I’d gotten into the finals again, like last year. I remember the stress, the joy, and the anticipation. I remember thinking that maybe just maybe we’d win, but that the other finalists were amazing. The competition is stiff, every finalist project is incredible.
Monday morning, hung over from the ridiculous party on Sunday night we sat in the hall watching the winners take the stage.
Winner after winner had amazing projects, none used Foundry.
As they got to the Grand Prize winner, I’d already told myself I was happy with two semi-finalist and a finalist team.
Then they announced the Grand Prize winner, Failtopia.
Our finalist team that had yet to secure a tech track or category win, but had a project with a ton of heart took home the top spot. Time stopped for a moment, my brain trying to catch up with reality. As the Failtopia team rushed to the stage, Joe and Richard were grabbing me and yelling, that’s our team, they used Foundry! I was speechless.
These guys put so much heart into their project and were such a diverse group of beautiful souls. They were the perfect encapsulation of what MIT’s Reality Hackathon stands for, and the perfect example of why I started, and open-sourced, Foundry - to enable more devs to make experiences like Failtopia.
As they took the stage and tearfully thanked everyone including us, I began to tear up too.
The late nights, the crazy startup idea, open sourcing a huge chunk of the product. All of it came to this moment, and Failtopia won - and so did we.
I have never been prouder of my team or myself. I get teary eyed again just writing this. I can’t really put into words how I feel, this post is my best attempt.
The XR community is full of some of the brightest minds in the technology industry, working on the literal frontier of the next era of computing. It’s also full of artistic designers leveraging immersion to bring us powerful experiences like Failtopia. It’s full of engineers with big hearts and good souls. It’s still a small community, but it’s full of the best people you could ever work with, or work for.
I’m proud of Sara, Nicolette, Lucy, Kabeer, and Emil for creating Failtopia and winning the hackathon.
I’m proud of Justin, Joe, Richard, Jasmine, Stefan, and my whole extended team and network for making Foundry happen.
I can’t wait to see how the rest of the year goes for us with Foundry, and I can’t wait to go back to MIT Reality Hack in 2024. I can’t wait to see what each hacker in the Failtopia team do with their careers.
The XR world is just getting started, and we’re cementing our place right in the heart of it, helping developers.
For more on Failtopia see their Devpost
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We hosted a small Spatial Ape demo with a feature we hacked together at the hackathon. A portal into the real world from within VR. It’s a trippy experience to be in VR and see a screen that’s a portal to yourself in the real world. We leveraged Dolby.io and their real time streaming plugin to Unity
Check out a small clip here:
Great story! Glad you've been a part of the Reality Hack community.