On Nov. 14–16, teams of up to four will take over the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center basement, with 36 hours to develop creations involving extended reality (XR), an umbrella term encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.
The event? Stanford XR’s third-annual Immerse the Bay hackathon.
Participants will enter one main track with themes that in past years have included gaming, education and healthcare. Winners from these tracks will win Stanford XR-sponsored prizes. Hackers can also enter their projects into up to five sponsor tracks that typically correspond to neurotechnology and equipment like headsets or haptic gloves.
Currently, the event’s publicly-released sponsors include Augmented World Expo (AWE), ByteDance, OpenBCI, Meta, Afference and more. OpenBCI is providing over $100,000 of headsets and AWE will be gifting tickets to their conference to the winners of their track.
The application process for the hackathon is simple, involving personal information, a one sentence question and a short response listing skills. All are welcome to apply, regardless of skill level.
“On the first day, we host workshops from industry leaders — last year we had sessions from Unity, Meta, NVIDIA, ShapesXR, and more — so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn while you’re here,” wrote Stanford XR core organizer Natalie Kuo ’27. “One of our club’s goals is to make XR more accessible, so even if you’re just curious and want to try something new, you’re absolutely welcome to join!”
In fact, teams can benefit from a diversity of skillsets.
“We’ve had artists on certain teams do graphic design,” said Stanford XR co-president of internal affairs Victor Chen ’27. “You can also have a product manager position or you can focus on the user interface.”
There will even be time for attendees to find teammates before the hacking begins.
“Going in, I didn’t know any other people in the XR community,” said Pranava Singhal M.S. ’26, who registered with no prior XR experience. “I made a lot of friends there and ended up forming a team with completely new people.”
After teams are created Friday evening, the hackathon will begin. Brunch and dinner will be served during the event.
Participants’ hard work can pay off — Singhal’s team won the Snapchat track by using Snap Spectacles to bring books to life with 3D characters. They were awarded tickets to Reality Hack, the XR hackathon hosted at MIT, and after using the Spectacles again Singhal was asked to join Snapchat’s accelerator program, where he continued work on his team’s idea.
Inspired by Reality Hack, Chen aims to continue expanding Immerse The Bay’s reach. Chen hopes to increase attendance from last year’s 340 participants to 400 this year.
“It is a little competitive,” he said, referring to the application process. “We don’t accept everyone, but I will say that we do prioritize Stanford students.”
For those who are accepted, Singhal believes the packed experience will be valuable.
“If you’re someone like me who’s never tried XR before and you’re curious about this space, sure, you can do classes and do projects, but those things take time and you have to build up expertise,” he said. “But with the hackathon, you can just quickly dip into the deep end and see how people are building things. You get a lot of exposure in a very short period of time.”