The Constant in the Code:
Reflections on MIT Reality Hack 2026
By Jesse McCulloch
There is a specific kind of magic that happens in Cambridge in the winter. It’s not just the crisp air, bright snow, or the historic backdrop of MIT; it’s the annual gathering of a community that has spent years - some of us nearly a decade - building the future we want to live in.
Returning to MIT Reality Hack this year felt like a homecoming. I’ve been attending this event since the early days at the MIT Media Lab, long before it bore its current name. In those beginnings, it and we were scrappier, fueled by a brand of delirium that led to making pancakes at midnight with a power drill and getting hopelessly, wonderfully lost in the basement maze of Building E15. Back then, we were dreaming of a world where XR wasn’t tethered to a backpack and a mess of cables; today, watching hackers build directly for Spectacles, that dream has finally become the baseline.
Over the years, the event has grown and matured. The logistics are smoother and the hardware is sleeker, but while Reality Hack has found its footing as a world-class institution, it has never lost its original creative inspiration. It’s a reminder that while the industry grows in fits and starts, the technology is merely the variable. The people are the constant.
Walking through the hacking floors this year, the nostalgia hits in waves. It’s a reunion of old friends who have been in the trenches since the beginning, swapping stories of early, clunky prototypes like old war stories. Many of them have graduated through the ranks, starting as hackers, ramping up to being a mentor, and in a lot of cases, finally joining the organization team to fulfill the dream of keeping the event moving forward year to year. Yet, just as vital is the new batch of future, old friends. Watching a first-time hacker’s eyes light up when they realize the potential of the glasses they’re holding is a mirror to our own early days.
At Spectacles, we often talk about removing the friction between an idea and its realization. This year, we saw that play out in real-time. It is incredibly rewarding to see that the tools we are building are finally catching up to the speed of human imagination.
Last year when we participated Spectacles had just barely arrived in the wild and our SDK and platform were still maturing. We had lots of interest from participants in the Hardware side of the hack, and we just were not set up to support them. This year we came prepared, with both Bluetooth Low Energy and Web Sockets capabilities, and boy were we impressed. From connected clothing that displayed emotion in color, to literal robotic control with the Reachy robot, we were blown away at how the intersection of AR and Hardware took off.
The other revolution that is taking place, and impossible to ignore, is the massive productivity and reasoning capabilities of AI. When you think about how AR glasses, with their rich sensor and vision platform, can become the sensing aspect of AI, the possibilities are endless. We wanted to lean into this as well with a prize for best Spectacles + AI lens, and we were not disappointed. The winning project for this category was Noodle, a Mixed Reality creative workbench that turns your physical surroundings into an infinite canvas for Generative AI.
On the first full day of hacking, a team approached us with a tough problem by any standard. Less than 12 hours into the hack, they had developed two distinct working MVPs using Lens Studio and the Spectacles Interaction Kit. They were faced with the ultimate “problem of plenty”, forced to decide which brilliant path to follow before the sun had even set on day one.
That is the inspired energy of Reality Hack. It’s a place where the distance between “What if?” and “Look at this!” shrinks to nearly nothing.
People often ask why events like this are so central to our work at Spectacles. The answer is simple: we don't build tools for the sake of the tools themselves; we build them for the people who have the audacity to use them.
Reality Hack is a pressure cooker for innovation, but more importantly, it is a testament to the resilience of this community. We persist because we believe in the shared experience of augmented reality - and because, deep down, we’re still those same people willing to use a power drill to make breakfast at scale.
To my old friends: thank you for staying the course. To the new ones: welcome to the family. I can’t wait to see you next year, and show you what we will have been working on!
If you would like to keep up with what our team, and the larger developer community is doing, check us out on Reddit at r/Spectacles, and join the conversation.