The MIT Reality Hack is one of the world’s most prestigious XR hackathons, a high-pressure environment where creativity and technical skill are pushed to their limits. This year, we were thrilled to see Tobias Reidl, founder of the XR development channel Alive Studios, and his team “Stairway Hackers” take home the prize for the “Augmented Intelligence” category.
Their secret weapon for rapid, cross-platform, AI-powered development? Needle Engine.
In a recent interview, Tobias shared how his team conceived, built, and won with their project, “Journify,” in just one weekend.
The Challenge: From Words to Worlds
The team tackled a deeply human problem: the growing emotional distance between parents and their children. “4 in 10 children lack an emotional bond with their parents” Tobias noted, a statistic that inspired their project.
Their solution, Journify, is a shared journaling experience that uses the power of generative AI. A child can talk about their day—“Today I had pizza!” or “My highlight was a trip to Paris!”—and the application transcribes their voice and uses AI to generate a 3D world filled with objects representing those memories. This creates a playful, explorable diorama that parents and children can experience together, sparking conversation and strengthening their bond.
The Technical Choice: Why Needle was the Perfect Fit
To bring Journify to life, the team needed a tool that was fast, flexible, and powerful. Their key requirements were:
- True Cross-Platform Access: The experience had to work seamlessly on a parent’s tablet or phone and on a child’s XR headset. This made WebXR the ideal technology.
- Easy API Integration: The core of the project relied on connecting to external generative AI services like OpenAI.
- Rapid Iteration: In a hackathon, speed is everything. They couldn’t afford to get bogged down by complex pipelines or slow build times.
Tobias, who has tested numerous WebAR/VR development tools, knew immediately that Needle was the right choice.
“I’ve been doing a lot of research,” he explained. “I’ve been testing many tools, but I always found a major caveat that didn’t let me use it for my real projects.”
Needle, however, checked all the boxes.
The Needle Advantage in Action
1. The Power of the Unity Workflow Instead of learning a new editor from scratch, the team could leverage their existing knowledge of Unity. This allowed them to immediately start building, using familiar workflows and even pulling in assets from the Unity Asset Store.
“I’m already used to working with Unity, and I also have a bunch of assets that I’ve already bought on the Asset Store. It would be very cumbersome to export those assets into a whole new editor.” - Tobias Reidl
2. Seamless Integration with Modern Web Tech Needle projects are structured as standard web projects (using vite, npm, and TypeScript). This made integrating the OpenAI API incredibly simple.
“It was very easy to integrate external API services. We could just use the standard web APIs to, for example, send a prompt and get a response back.”
This is a critical advantage. Needle doesn’t lock you into a proprietary system; it empowers you to use the best of the entire web development ecosystem.
3. Blazing-Fast, Collaborative Iteration The most significant advantage at the hackathon was Needle’s “inner loop”—the time it takes to see a change reflected in the final experience. The team developed a highly efficient workflow where one person would test the experience in an XR headset while others made live adjustments in Unity.
“These kind of iteration cycles, which are so important for developers… they were very short, and that was extremely helpful, also under time pressure.”
This collaborative, real-time feedback loop allowed them to fine-tune the user experience at a speed that other teams couldn’t match. “I think we were by far the fastest team,” Tobias concluded.
A Winning Combination
The story of Journify is a perfect example of what’s possible when you combine a great idea with the right tools. By bridging the gap between the power of Unity and the accessibility of the web, Needle empowered the Stairway Hackers to build an innovative, award-winning application in a single weekend.
It proves that you no longer have to choose between a rich 3D development environment and the instant, cross-platform reach of the browser. With Needle, you can have both.
We are incredibly proud of Tobias and his team and can’t wait to see what they build next.
Ready to build your own amazing 3D web experiences?