Hygge

The pitch

Hygge is a Danish word for cozy contentment. The kind of feeling you get from a fire, a blanket, and somewhere warm to sit on a cold night. We built a Quest 3 experience designed entirely around that feeling, for the Meta + SensAI hackathon.

What we made

Something to put on after a long day. A room, a window, a fire. Spatial audio doing most of the warmth. Hand tracking for the few small things you can reach out and touch. No combat. No productivity. No "imagine your office in VR." Just a place to sit inside for a while.

What won it

🥇 1st place, Immersive Entertainment.

Most hackathon judging biases toward novel use cases. The shiny thing nobody has done before. Hygge took the opposite bet. A familiar feeling rendered with unusual care. There's a whole genre of immersive work that doesn't get shipped because it doesn't survive the demo-day metric, and this was an argument for paying attention to it.

Stack

Quest 3 and Unity. Meta's scene model feeds an LLM a picture of what you're looking at, Wit handles speech to text, and OpenAI does the reasoning, so the ambiance responds to the actual room. Spatial audio for ambient warmth, hand tracking and depth occlusion for the small interactions. AI did heavy lifting in the asset pipeline too: mesh and texture generation for props, and generated video for the commercial.

Role and collaborators

Team of five. I owned concept, design, scene composition, the audio mix, and the trailer, and presented the demo. Sid Naik carried the XR engineering, Yoofi Annan drove product and strategy, and Dolores Joya and Remi Gao rounded out the design team, with three of us working directly in Unity and C#.