Last week my team and I won a $50,000 award in the Meta Start Developer Competition, and that moment reinforced something I have come to believe deeply: designers belong in XR not just as thinkers, but as builders whose work actively shapes the future of spatial computing.

Note: Extended Reality, or XR, refers to immersive technologies that blend physical and digital worlds, including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality.

Here’s that award winning project:

I’m a recent design graduate. A year ago, I did not have a polished XR app, a strong technical foundation, or a clear sense of how designers were supposed to fit into this industry. What I did have was curiosity, a willingness to prototype badly in public, and a growing belief that XR needs more designers who are willing to build, not just concept.

One thing I’ve consistently noticed across the XR industry is how few designers stay long enough to see their ideas become real. Many dip their toe in through a hackathon or workshop, feel intimidated by the technical barriers or unstable tooling, and walk away. That hesitation makes sense. XR is still fragmented, demanding, and often unforgiving.

But moments like this win confirm something important: the path is real. Designers can move beyond Figma mockups and animations. They can ship, iterate, and compete alongside experienced developers. Not by abandoning their design skill set, but by extending it into systems, interactions, and spatial logic.

This article is a reflection on how I went from a design student experimenting with XR to building projects that are starting to live in the industry. My hope is that other designers can use this journey as a reference point, proof that transitioning into XR development is not only possible, but genuinely worth pursuing.

The Starting Point

It doesn’t matter what major you come from to get into XR Design, but not for the reason people usually expect. There is no stable, formal pipeline into XR development. College curricula move slowly by necessity. By the time a course is designed, approved, and staffed, the tools it teaches are already outdated. XR development kits, engines, and SDKs evolve far too quickly to be captured in a traditional academic structure.

Because of that, I don’t think there’s a definitive “XR design curriculum,” and there likely won’t be one anytime soon. Even core XR design fundamentals are still being actively defined through experimentation rather than textbooks. What matters more than a specific major is whether your education trained you to adapt, learn unfamiliar tools quickly, and think critically about systems.

For context, I studied at Parsons in Design and Technology, a major that I think of as creative technology at its core. It combined UX thinking, a bit of foundational coding, and a strong emphasis on critical problem-solving. (The foundational coding was cut short by multiple strikes, but that’s okay!) That background became especially useful in my second year, when friends encouraged me to apply to Reality Hack @ MIT.

Reality Hack was my first exposure to XR as a builder. Unlike many hackathons, it explicitly welcomes designers and pairs them with developers to prototype XR projects in just three days. At the time, I had never built an XR project before. I was learning in real time, surrounded by people who were far more technically experienced than I was.

I was extremely fortunate with my team. Together, we built I’llByte, a jaw haptic device that let users bite into virtual objects. The project became a grand finalist and won the hardware track, an outcome that fundamentally changed how I saw my place in XR.

I carried that momentum into several more hackathons, including projects with SpinMaster, Meta Presence Platform, and NEWVIEW. Each one became a focused exercise in product thinking under constraint: forming teams quickly, defining a clear problem, prototyping something tangible, and pitching it effectively.

Over time, a pattern emerged. When I won, I studied the other projects to understand where they struggled. When I didn’t, I researched more deeply into what made the strongest work succeed and where my own approach fell short. Hackathons became less about the outcome and more about sharpening my instincts as a designer-builder.

The Catalyst Project: Building Chloro

After nearly two years of building XR projects exclusively in teams, I felt a growing urge to work solo. Hackathons had taught me how to collaborate, ship quickly, and pitch effectively, but I wanted to understand what it meant to carry a product end to end. In 2025, I decided to enter the XR Design Challenge hosted by immersive insiders on my own, adapting research from a mobile product idea I had been developing into an XR experience.

I didn’t realize at the time that this decision would become a turning point.

Chloro became my anchor project. It’s a houseplant care app that combines mixed reality interaction with traditional product design principles, built for people who may or may not already care about XR.

That mindset paid off. Chloro became a finalist, which was both validating and sobering. It didn’t win, largely because I hadn’t submitted a playable prototype. I could clearly articulate the technical approach, the spatial interactions, and the value it could bring to the houseplant community, but I hadn’t fully built it yet.

That gap was impossible to ignore. For the first time, my biggest limitation wasn’t design thinking or ideation. It was execution.

Many of the strongest XR builders I admired had something in common: a personal product they kept returning to. Not a one-off demo, but a project that evolved as their skills evolved. Chloro became that project for me. I cleaned it up, expanded its scope, and started using it as the foundation for applications to programs, talks, and industry opportunities.

👉🏼 If you’re interested in Chloro, you can get notified for early access here: https://chloroapp.com/

Getting Comfortable Being Bad in Public

I mentioned earlier that there’s no established curriculum for XR development, so how do existing developers get there? The fastest way for me to learn the newest versions of SDKs wasn’t through Youtube videos and documentation alone, but by surrounding myself with people who had already shipped real XR projects. I used Chloro to apply to the Meta Start Developer Program, knowing that proximity to experienced developers would matter more than any single resource.

The Meta Start Partners Discord is filled with XR veterans, engine specialists, and creators who had navigated multiple generations of SDKs and hardware. I made a point to show up consistently: asking questions, participating in conversations, and answering what I could as I experimented with newer versions of the Meta SDK.

But, I’m a really bad coder. When I brought Chloro into a playtesting session, the limitations were immediately obvious. At one point, the app was running at a mind-numbing 24 frames per second. It was the kind of performance issue you can’t explain away with good intentions or strong visuals.

What surprised me was how supportive the community was. Instead of dismissing the project, experienced XR developers walked me through exactly where things were going wrong: scene complexity, excessive draw calls, interaction overhead, and assumptions I didn’t yet know I was making. (Thank you friends!)

Sharing unfinished work publicly forced me to confront reality faster, iterate more deliberately, and internalize constraints that no tutorial could teach.

Industry Exposure as Motivation, Not Validation

I used Chloro to apply to Augmented World Expo (AWE), probably the largest XR conference in the industry. I was accepted through the Builders Program in partnership with immersive insiders, which gave me the opportunity to pitch Chloro to investors, peers, and potential collaborators. More importantly, it placed me in conversations that would shape the next phase of my work.

That week, I met people who would later become collaborators and long-term contacts. One of those conversations was with a studio director who introduced me to the Spatial SDK, a technical direction that would become central later in my journey. (oooh foreshadowing)

Not long after, I was invited to Meta Connect, as well as the Meta Dev Summit. I’m still not entirely sure which part of my work with Chloro triggered the invitation, but suddenly I was attending roundtables, speaking directly with veteran developers, and learning in person from people who had been building in this space for years.

On one of the evenings, I found myself at a dinner party briefly talking with Boz about Chloro. It was surreal. I didn’t feel like I fully belonged in that room, but what connected everyone there wasn’t seniority or titles. It was curiosity and a shared belief in where this industry could go.

Meta Connect leaned heavily into AI glasses, but I was equally interested in headsets. Rather than choosing sides, I started aligning my thinking across both. These devices are not as competing platforms, but as parts of the same future ecosystem.

I left these events energized and with a sense of responsibility. I took that momentum seriously and used it as fuel for what came next.

Momentum

After Meta Connect, I pushed myself harder in XR than I ever had before. The conversations, technical exposure, and broader industry context gave me clarity, and I acted on it immediately.

I was invited to speak as part of the AWE United XR Builders Program, sharing lessons from building Chloro and navigating XR as a designer. In many ways, this article is an extension of that talk: a more reflective version of the same core message about designers becoming builders.

Soon after, I joined XRCC, another hackathon hosted by immersive insiders. This time, I wasn’t just participating as a hacker. I also gave a lecture on XR Design, translating what I had learned into guidance for other designers entering the space.

For the hackathon itself, I built Fond, a prototype cooking assistant designed for Ray-Ban smart displays. The idea explored how saved cooking reels on your phone could become lightweight, glanceable references while cooking, rather than videos you constantly scrub through with messy hands. Fond placed runner-up in its track, reinforcing that my instincts around spatial utility and everyday workflows were sharpening.

But midway through XRCC, the Meta Start Developer Competition was announced. I was highly motivated to compete, and instead of narrowing my scope, I doubled down. I submitted two projects.

The first was a full refactor of Chloro, complete with a new video and clearer articulation of its technical and spatial foundation.

And you may have guessed it: The second was Compile Crops, a project built in collaboration with Gulzar, a Spatial SDK developer, informed directly by conversations and insights from AWE and Meta Connect.

Unfortunately, Chloro 2.0 didn’t win. But Compile Crops did!

The Pattern That Emerged

If you take anything from this article, let it be this:

Research. Build. Talk about it.

1. Research what already exists, not to copy it, but to understand the landscape you’re entering. XR is small enough that context still matters, and knowing what has already been tried can save months of misdirected effort.

2. Build something imperfect but real. Demos teach you ideas. Products teach you constraints. Even rough prototypes expose performance limits, interaction flaws, and assumptions that no deck or mockup ever will.

3. Talk about your work publicly and invite feedback. Share early. Share often. The fastest growth I experienced came from putting unfinished work in front of people who knew more than I did and being willing to listen.

End of Year Reflection: The XR Freeze

The end of the year has been unsettling for XR. Reality Labs’ revenue cuts, the increasing push toward AI glasses, and XR studios losing funding or quietly shutting down have created a sense of uncertainty across the industry. It raises a difficult question: how do we keep building when the ground feels unstable?

I‘m not in the position yet to answer that. (haha)

All I know is that whether this slowdown lasts one year or more, it’s a rare opportunity to learn deeply and hone skills without the pressure of hype cycles. And as builders, we can actively shape the future by building practical, present-day XR tools rather than building for speculative futures. Work that respects today’s hardware, today’s users, and today’s constraints.

My resolution in 2026 is simple: to keep building. Maybe with fewer hackathons, because those have been exhausting, but with more intention. I’d also like to be more transparent about how I translate my design background into XR development, and more vocal about the missteps along the way.

If you’re a designer wondering whether there’s a place for you in XR, there is. The path isn’t linear, and it isn’t polished, but it’s real.

And now is as good as any time to start walking it!

Find more of my work here:
Portfolio: https://www.grassepark.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grassepark/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grassepark/

Thanks for reading!