World Models, Gaussian Splats, and $17K in Prizes: World in Action Hackathon Lands in Downtown LA Before SIGGRAPH

A world model and GenAI hackathon, Worlds in Action Hack [02-LA]: SIGGRAPH Edition, runs July 18-19, 2026 at the Arizona State University California Center on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, with a Friday warm-up day of workshops and team formation on July 17. Presented by SensAI Hackademy and co-hosted by Poeia XR and Machine Cinema, the event gives teams two days to build interactive, AI-driven 3D worlds, then puts the winning projects in front of SIGGRAPH week.

• Six challenge tracks span filmmaking and entertainment, gaming and UGC, interactive ads and brand activations, world models and 3D GenAI, agentic interfaces, and 3D reconstruction.

• Roughly $17,000 in total prize value, including a cash pool, World Labs API credits, and an XGRIDS PortalCam scanner.

• Judges and advisors from NVIDIA, Meta, ByteDance, Google, World Labs, and Roblox weigh the final builds.

Teams get two days to ship interactive AI worlds across six tracks

The hackathon frames itself around world models, the AI systems that generate navigable 3D scenes rather than flat images or clips. Participants build across six challenge categories: filmmaking, entertainment and simulation; gaming and UGC experiences; interactive or video ad, brand, or fan activations; world models and 3D GenAI implementation; agentic interfaces and systems; and 3D reconstruction projects.

The schedule starts with a July 17 keynote, workshops, networking, and team formation. Saturday opens with a kickoff briefing, ideation, two workshop blocks, and one-on-one project validation. Sunday runs a final sprint to a 1:00 PM submission deadline, followed by judging, a public showcase, and closing. One listed workshop, "Powered By Gaussian Splats: From World Models to 3D Interactive Worlds," ties the build tools directly to the Gaussian splatting techniques the tracks reward.

The prize stack pairs a cash pool with hardware and API credits

Organizers list a $10,000 prize pool alongside $2,000 in World Labs API credits and an XGRIDS PortalCam valued at $5,000, plus SIGGRAPH tickets and a showcase opportunity during the conference.

The PortalCam reward is hardware VP Land readers already know. We covered the $5,000 handheld scanner at launch as a Gaussian splatting capture device.

At the NAB Show, we took a closer look at how its LiDAR and four-camera array turn real-world locations into reconstructions.

The World Labs credits give teams spatial AI tooling from the company behind Marble, its multimodal 3D world generator.

World Labs also shipped Spark 2.0, which streams 3D Gaussian splatting worlds in a browser.

Partners and sponsors for the event include Pico, ByteDance, World Labs, XGRIDS, Unity, AWE, Beeble, Volinga, and Devpost.

Judges include developer advocates and engineers from major XR and AI teams

The advisor and judge roster pulls from across the spatial computing industry. Named judges include David Gene Oh from ByteDance's global developer advocacy team, Yiqi Zhao, a product design lead at Meta, and Ian Curtis, a product designer at World Labs. Neil Trevett, NVIDIA's VP of developer ecosystems and president of the Khronos Group, appears on the roster alongside Fasai Phuathavornskul, a senior software engineer on Google's Android XR, and Alberto Hojel, an AI engineer at Roblox.

Investor and studio voices round out the panel, including Tipatat Chennavasin, general partner and co-founder of The VR Fund, Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens, and Sonya Haskins, head of programming at AWE.

Application-based hacker passes are free, with spectator and mentor tickets open

Hacker access is free and application-based, and the event lists separate spectator, volunteer, mentor, and researcher registration types. The audience skews toward XR creators, AI filmmakers, developers, researchers, game designers, and world model builders, the same crowd converging on Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH. Teams that place get a showcase slot during the conference, turning a weekend build into visibility in front of the spatial AI research community. Registration and the full schedule are posted on the event page.