HackHive 2026 was a chance to build quickly, think more carefully about accessibility, and work on a product idea that had a clear human reason to exist. Our team focused on AssistMe, a gaze-driven interface for communication and decision-making.
HackHive 2026 ended up being one of those weekends where the idea only really worked once the interaction got simple enough. Our team built AssistMe around a clear accessibility problem: helping users communicate and make selections without depending on precise mouse movement or complicated setup. The more we worked on it, the more obvious it became that the product could not feel like a tech demo. It had to feel calm, direct, and understandable within a few seconds.
My part of that work was helping shape the interaction so the project felt usable instead of just impressive on paper. That meant working on webcam-based eye tracking, reducing jitter, thinking through region-based selection, and making sure returning users would not need to repeat calibration from scratch. We also kept the demo focused on a clean loop: look, select, generate the next set of options, and speak the result back. That made the system easier to explain and easier to trust.
The biggest lesson for me was that accessibility work gets better when it reduces effort instead of demanding more precision. Large focus regions made more sense than tiny targets. Guided choices made more sense than forcing full open-ended input. Even the way we talked about the project mattered, because a good demo is not just about what the code can do. It is about whether the flow makes sense to the person seeing it for the first time.
I also liked that the weekend reinforced the kind of engineering I want to keep doing. There was product thinking, real-time behavior, AI integration, persistence, and a strong reason for why the system should exist at all. If I keep pushing this project forward, the next things I would want to improve are usability testing, smoother onboarding, and more personalized interaction behavior for different users.