EmberHacks 2026 challenges you to build your own real-world intelligent interface. Give AI a way to interact with the world, not just answer questions in a chat window.

This year's theme asks you to build an interface that uses Gemini to interpret real-world or human input and turn it into something meaningful, whether that's an action, a visualization, or a piece of generated content. Gemini needs to actually do the interpreting or reasoning in your project. Bolting a chatbot onto an existing app won't cut it.

Your input can be text, voice, images, video, sensor data, physical interactions, documents, or anything else that captures something happening in the real world. Your output can be text, voice, a visualization, an action your app takes, a physical action, or generated content of any kind. We want to see projects that would be genuinely hard, awkward, or impossible to pull off with a normal keyboard and screen.

Build for whatever platform fits your idea. Web, mobile, desktop, hardware, robotics, games, physical installations, or some mix of these are all fair game. If you can dream it up and Gemini plays a real role in how it works, bring it.

Expect a weekend of building alongside other students, mentors on hand to help when you get stuck, and a community that's genuinely excited about what you're making.

• Use of Gemini
  How central Gemini is to the project's actual interaction loop. Rewards projects where Gemini does real interpretation or reasoning on the input, not a chatbot feature bolted on that could be swapped out without changing what the project does.
• Interface Design and Interaction
  Considers whether the project uses an input or output method that would be genuinely hard, awkward, or impossible to pull off with a normal keyboard and screen, and how well that interaction is designed.
• Technical Implementation
  Focuses on the quality of the build, the technical skills demonstrated, and how effectively the project was executed within the given time, including how well voice, vision, sensor, or hardware input was handled.
• Practicality and Impact
  Measures whether the project can be used or scaled in real-world contexts and if it addresses a meaningful problem.
• Originality
  Evaluates how fresh and unique the idea is, and how seriously the team leaned into the real-world-interface angle of the theme rather than defaulting to a chatbot with an app around it.
• Presentation and Communication
  Examines how clearly the team explains their idea, how Gemini fits into it, their approach, limitations, and future plans, and how smoothly the live demo comes across.