Meta Quest Hackathon showed us how diverse the application of Mixed Reality can be

Arachnophil uses Mixed Reality to help users overcome their fear of arachnids. The app takes a gentle approach with slowly escalating tasks featuring spiders. It starts out with letting users slowly approach a spider and soon has them searching their room for more.

The concept is very similar to the recently released Nope Challenge. Nope Challenge has players facing 40 different phobias in VR, including spiders. However, unlike Nope Challenge, Arachnophil isn’t about thrills and screams. Arachnophil is designed to help the user and is a fascinating look at how XR can be used for positive real-life use cases.

Using the Quest headsets’ hand tracking, BSL Teacher will help users learn the basics of sign language. It’s a look at how XR can be used in the future for teaching. It’s a very simple proof-of-concept app but also very useful and something that can be built upon in the future.

Off the top of my head I can think of a few other instances where such a learning methodology could come in handy. For example, learning how to play the piano using a virtual guide that tracks your hands or practicing complex medical surgeries.

We recently saw the release of Astra, a Mixed Reality game that turned your room into a spaceship. Extended Room follows a similar concept and lets you pick and choose what kind of environment you want.

Your room is seamlessly integrated into a virtual location of your choosing. These locations can include a rainforest, a beach or even a cyberpunk city. Apps like Extended Room are something I think will become very common in the near future as XR catches on. After all, I too would prefer looking out at a futuristic city over my neighbor’s house.

Flux, to me, feels like the grandfather of the JARVIS-like holographic simulators we’ll one day inevitably have. The app lets you play around with virtual circuits, wiring and even write code in an in-app IDE (integrated development environment).

Flux then executes your code for your virtual robots and gives you realistic results. You can use Flux to actually prototype projects before trying them out in the real world, without any expenses or risks. It’s truly fascinating and definitely something that I think will catch on for various niches.

Sort of like BSL Teacher, Flaivor is another way Mixed Reality can be used for education and guidance in everyday life. Flaivor uses MR and AI to provide you with a virtual assistant named Martha.

Martha can suggest recipes based on what ingredients you have on hand or even guide you through preparing a dish. Cooking has never been easier, and it helps that Martha looks and talks like a doting grandma.

Speaking of inevitable JARVIS-like assistants, say hello to GARVIS. GARVIS is very clearly a work in progress but it seems quite promising and shows us how AI assistants could function in the future. One of my favorite bits from the GARVIS demo is when it renders a 3D model of an eclipse after being asked to.

Meta is currently working on AI-powered AR smart glasses and this is sort of what I envision they’ll be like. As AI gets incorporated into mobile assistants and AR glasses keep getting better, things like GARVIS should become a lot more common.

The full list of the 182 entries can be found here. There are a lot of good entries so go show the developers some love and support. Who knows, one of them might end up making one of the best MR games of all time.