Inside SensAI Hack San Francisco: XR, AI, and the Future of Reality

On a foggy December weekend in downtown San Francisco, SensAI Hack turned a floor of Frontier Tower into a live rendering engine for the future of computing. Over a thousand people registered to build XR and AI experiences that don’t just live on screens, but anchor themselves in the physical world — on hands, faces, streets, and city objects.

In less than two days, participants prototyped “prompted realities,” tested hand-tracking pipelines, and discovered what happens when world-class XR mentors sit shoulder-to-shoulder with first-time builders. This was not another generic hackathon; it was a pressure test of what happens when spatial computing, AI, and human curiosity converge in one room.

From Global Tour to San Francisco’s XR Stage

SensAI Hack San Francisco is part of a global series that has already passed through Barcelona, Stockholm, Istanbul, Cologne, and London. As one organizer put it, “after Barcelona, Stockholm, Istanbul, Cologne, London, we wanted to also get across the ocean one time. And San Francisco is the hub for all major technologies.”

The result: a dense, high-signal weekend at Frontier Tower @ Spaceship, just off Market Street — a place where “the event to feel like a reel” wasn’t just a tagline, it was literally what people were building.

Global organizer Rahel Demant, Founder of VR/AR Academy and SensAI Hackademy, summed up the momentum afterward: over 1,500 registrations, a project gallery of XRAI prototypes, and a room full of builders who now see reality as programmable.

Key Moments from the Weekend

• Opening framing on the “next generation of computing” driven by glasses and spatial interfaces.
• Participants describing SensAI Hack as “awesome, immersive, prophetic” — and “crazy with you.”
• First-time makers realizing they can “prompt a reality into existence” without traditional coding.
• Hands-on exploration of camera-based hand, pose, and landmark tracking for XR experiences.
• Judges drilling into impact: “what more could be done and how can this make an impact in society?”
• Mentors working table-to-table, helping teams validate use cases, not just ship demos.
• Projects moving beyond entertainment into medical, accessibility, and education use cases.

The Next Computing Platform: Glasses, Not Screens

The weekend began with a clear thesis: we’re at the edge of a platform shift. As one mentor put it, “we’re heading into this next generation of computing, which will mostly be through a form factor like glasses. Being able to build experiences that are anchored in the real world and encourage you to engage with different objects in the real world.”

That framing changed how teams thought. Instead of “an app that runs on a device,” the default unit of design became “a moment that happens in real space” — in a clinic, on a street corner, at a workbench. The hack wasn’t about chasing the next chatbot; it was about using AI to make physical environments interactive, contextual, and adaptive.

What People Built / Topics Covered

With a prompt like SensAI, the projects fell into a few clear clusters:

• XR + AI interfaces for non-coders: Experiences where people could describe what they wanted and “prompt a reality into existence,” turning natural language into visual, spatial interactions.
• Hand, pose, and body tracking: Teams explored “camera tracking of hands and landmarks and poses… how fast it is and how automatic it is and how easy it is to build,” using XR toolkits and AI-powered tracking.
• Medical and communication use cases: Builders gravitated toward “use cases that are designed to help people with medical issues or communication issues,” pushing XR beyond games into assistive tech.
• Education and training: Several concepts moved “out of the entertainment space and more into an educational space,” using immersive overlays to teach skills, procedures, or abstract concepts.
• Societal impact projects: Many teams framed their work in terms of “how can they make an impact in the society in general,” not just “cool UX.”

Technically, the weekend hit a lot of ground fast: camera-based tracking pipelines, landmarks and skeletons, real-time inference, spatial anchoring, and the messy UX questions of how you explain an AI reaction when it’s happening around someone’s body, not inside a rectangle.

Mentors & Highlights

Part of what made SensAI Hack feel dense and real was the bench of judges, workshop hosts, and on-site mentors circulating through the room.

Judges

• Avi Bar-Zeev – Founder & President, The XR Guild; long-time pioneer in spatial computing.
• Asim Ahmed – Head of Product Marketing, Niantic Spatial, Inc.
• Alex Sink – Senior Developer Relations Engineer.
• Nivedita Gaur – Silicon Architect for AR/Smart glasses at Meta.
• Marco DeMiroz – Co-founder & General Partner, The VR Fund.
• John Dagdelen – Founder of Fluid.
• Roan Weigert – DevRel @ Aparavi
• Robert Scoble – Founder & CEO, Unaligned.
• Yağız Mungan – AR/VR Software Engineer at Meta.

According to one organizer, “judges were very curious on what they’re building, what more could be done and how can they make an impact in the society in general.” Teams didn’t just get scored; they got interrogated like real product teams shipping into real markets.

Workshops & Mentors

• Nigel Hartman – Led an “amazing workshop” that helped participants get hands-on with XR/AI building blocks.

On the floor, mentors made the difference between “neat demo” and “viable experience”:

• Nico Fara – The GTM Architect, helping teams sharpen value propositions and go-to-market narratives.
• David Gene Oh – Bringing product and creative perspective to XR interactions.
• Rayyan Zahid – Guiding teams through technical tradeoffs.
• Forrest Sun – Helping builders think about human-centered design in spatial experiences.
• Greg Madison – Pushing on interaction models that feel natural at human scale.
• Dhruv Diddi – Supporting teams on the engineering side of XR+AI integration.

Organizers

• Rahel Demant – Founder, VR/AR Academy; Global Organizer, SensAI Hackademy.
• Colin Lowenberg – Organizer, helping bring SensAI Hack to San Francisco.
• Ferhan Özkan – Organizer, part of the global SensAI engine.
• Kathleen B., Laura Murinova, Varun Siddaraju – Running the behind-the-scenes ops that make a 1,500+ registration event actually work.

Humans in the Loop: What It Felt Like in the Room

If you strip away the frameworks and buzzwords, SensAI Hack SF was about humans discovering new capabilities in themselves and in the tools on their laptops.

One participant distilled it in a single line: “The most important part is meeting other people that are passionate as much as you are about technologies and great ideas that will improve the world.” For all the talk of AI and automation, the center of gravity stayed on community.

Another builder described the emotional arc this way: “Everyone has been so lovely and I met some people at the initial talk and online, and so meeting everyone in person has been really fantastic for me… bonding with everyone has been kind of a highlight, I would say.”

For some, this was their first time feeling like they belonged in tech at all. One participant admitted, “I thought that I was excluded from tech. I was never interested in coding, but we’re getting close to this time where you can kind of prompt a reality into existence. I can use all my earned and learned wisdom over time to create things that no one has seen before.”

That shift — from “I don’t code” to “I can build realities” — might be the most important outcome of the entire weekend.

From Entertainment to Impact

XR has long been associated with games and entertainment. At SensAI Hack, you could feel that center of mass moving. As one mentor described it, “now I see with XR, we see all these use cases that are designed to help people with medical issues or communication issues. We see these things that are breaking out of the entertainment space and more into an educational space.”

Another voice captured the emotional tone in one line: “SensAI hack for me is excitement.” That excitement wasn’t just about shiny demos; it was about realizing that spatial interfaces and AI can be applied to real-world constraints — accessibility, healthcare, education, communication.

The empathy piece showed up again and again. One mentor talked about “that spark of magic to the empathy that you get from seeing the world from a different point of view.” When you put someone in a headset or overlay an AI reaction on their own body, you’re not just feeding them information; you’re changing their vantage point.

Quotes from the Floor

Why This Matters for Builders

If you’re a founder, engineer, or designer in the San Francisco tech ecosystem, SensAI Hack SF is a signal: XR+AI is not a separate world from the rest of software — it’s the same stack, extended into space.

You don’t need to bet your whole roadmap on headsets tomorrow. But you probably do need to start thinking about:

• How your product behaves when reality becomes a UI surface.
• What happens when non-coders can “prompt” complex interactions instead of learning your tool.
• How you’ll handle privacy, safety, and explainability when AI is reacting to bodies, not just clicks.

Events like SensAI Hack are where those questions stop being hypothetical and start being prototypes.