EYE FIRST
A hands-free interface concept for mixed reality.
Year 2026 Context Thinking Rocks Interface Pioneer Hackathon — 48 hours Hardware Varjo XR-3 Role Concept, UX/UI design, pitch Team [Aware teammate], [Huawei teammate], Kristaps Grieznis Stack Unity HDRP · Varjo SDK · Gaze tracking · YOLOv8 / Sentis
Intro
XR was meant to free our hands. But every mixed-reality headset on the market still borrows its controls from phones — buttons, taps, gestures. Even with the future strapped to your face, you have to put down what you're doing to use it.
Over 48 hours, we asked a simpler question: what if just looking was enough?
The problem
Today's XR controls are copied from phones. The headset is new — the interface isn't. Switching a view, opening a tool, confirming a choice all demand a hand. In the moments that matter most, the operator's hands belong on the work, not on the menu.
Caption for problem slide: Built for freedom, but still requires hands to use it.
The solution
A gaze-driven navigation interface for the Varjo XR-3. Look to reveal. Dwell to commit. Every action becomes a glance.
The system reads where the user is looking in real time, and surfaces affordances only at the point of attention. Nothing demands the center of view. Nothing intrudes on the world.
Caption for solution slide: An interface that reacts to where you look — natural, optimized, and quiet by default.
View modes
Three vision layers, each one a glance away.
— Natural. The world as it is. — Night Vision. The world without light. — Thermal Camera + Human Detection. The world as heat, with people quietly outlined.
Each mode applies a real-time shader to the headset's pass-through camera feed, transforming what the operator sees in roughly 250 ms — long enough to feel optical, short enough to feel responsive.
Functions
Three persistent utilities sit in the periphery: Time, Human Detection, Live Location Map. Each was designed for ambient awareness — readable when needed, invisible when not.
Person detection runs on-device via YOLOv8 and Unity Sentis. No cloud, no latency, no telemetry leaving the headset.
Reflection
Designing eye-first is not a style. It's a different grammar. Hairlines instead of cards. Typography instead of icons. Attention instead of commands.
The hardest part wasn't building it — it was unlearning what touch and click had taught us about interaction.
Credits
Concept & design — Kristaps Grieznis Engineering — [name] AI / Detection — [name] Hardware — Varjo XR-3 Built at — Thinking Rocks Interface Pioneer Hackathon 2026