For Iovine and Young Academy students, 36 hours could be enough to create a winning prototype in assistive technology. First-year Academy students Danny Huang, Lorenzo Ametrano, Justin Zhu, and Ming Jin Yong did just that at the 2025 ImmerseGT Hackathon, the largest, invite-only XR (short for extended reality) hackathon in the world. XR hackathons seek to innovate in augmented and virtual reality technologies.

ImmerseGT takes place at the Klaus Atrium at Georgia Institute of Technology, where eligible college students are provided with access to industry-leading mentors and software developers in the XR space. Participants can attend workshops throughout the event and can compete in 7 categories: Overall Best Winner, Intelligent Immersion, Gaming Health and Fitness, Lifestyle, Best use of Snap spectacles from Snap AR, Niantic Sponsor prize, and Meshy GenAI 3D Excellence Award.

The four Academy freshman developed VeriSight, “the world’s first XR app that helps schizophrenic patients with delusions and vision hallucinations in real time”, and won Overall Best Winner. The group took to innovating in the emerging medium of mixed reality and was inspired by two common treatment options for patients with schizophrenia who experience visual hallucinations: service dogs trained to “greet” somebody if patients suspect a hallucination and using a phone’s camera to try and verify reality. The VeriSight app combines these two input methods within extended reality. 

“With the click of a button, [smart glasses] sense your surroundings and detect all of the people present in the space around you. A blue outline of a person is projected on top of all detected people. No outline could mean that what the user is seeing is not actually there! The other is an AI agent that can describe the environment around you. Simply hold down the trigger, ask it any question regarding what you're looking at, and get a response in seconds.”

The prototype of VeriSight “uses Quest 3's depth-sensing camera and Unity's newest computer vision model, Sentis, to detect and track the movement of people around the user,” wrote Danny Huang in a LinkedIn post celebrating their win. “We also used the newest Gemini Live API for scene understanding, where the user can ask anything about their environment to the headset to see whether they are seeing something imaginary or real.”

Within just 36 hours, the VeriSight team utilized brand new tools to design an app to tackle a problem they are deeply passionate about. VeriSight could be used in day-to-day life as “a non-intrusive, unmedicated treatment for schizophrenia symptoms”. Beyond the ImmenseGT Hackathon, the Verisight team is already discussing continuing development as new Santis models get released from Meta with the hope that one day, the capabilities of Meta Quest 3 will one day be available in a compact, wearable form factor like glasses. 

Students of the Iovine and Young Academy students have held a strong presence in hackathons around the U.S. for years, particularly those focused on impact-creating innovation.

Academy Students Take First at ImmerseGT Hackathon