The Ministry of Science and ICT (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon) held the awards ceremony for the 2026 AI and Virtual Convergence (XR) Service Developer Competition at the Virtual Convergence Industry Hub in Pangyo, Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do, on September 30, honoring 32 outstanding teams selected from among 497 teams and 1,029 participants. The event brought together in one place the talents of young developers and creators who turned artificial intelligence and virtual convergence technologies into real services.
 [코리안투데이] The awards ceremony for the 2026 AI and Virtual Convergence (XR) Service Developer Competition © 장형임 기자 |
Now in its sixth year, the competition has become a leading stage for discovering young talent in the field of virtual convergence service and content development, drawing a cumulative total of 2,439 teams and 5,688 participants over the years. Its purpose is to find young people with ideas for new services and support them in building those ideas themselves.
This year’s competition drew a total of 497 teams and 1,029 participants, including 258 elementary, middle and high school students and 771 university students and other young adults, who went through five months of service and content production training and one-on-one mentoring. Since last year, the competition has been divided into a Developer Division, in which participants build AI and XR services directly, and a Creator Division, which makes use of global user-generated content (UGC) platforms such as Roblox and MapleStory Worlds. In particular, reflecting the growing importance of AI skills in the service development process, this year participants were given additional AI development tools and their use of AI was factored into the evaluation.
Fourteen domestic and international companies, including Roblox, Nexon Korea, Upstage, Unity Technologies Korea, Overdare Korea, VerseWork, Ducogen, Diarium, Sims Reality, Synex, Hyper Cloud, Newjak, Urideol and Besttech, took part as sponsoring companies, presenting participants with tasks from the early stages of the competition and supporting mentoring and evaluation. Observers say the public-private cooperation model, in which companies pose tasks tied to real product demand and guide them through to completion, raised the quality of the final results.
The winning teams were selected through three stages of document review, presentation review and final evaluation, overcoming competition of 6.4 to 1. The 32 teams (84 people) included four teams receiving the grand prize, the Award of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, as well as four teams receiving the top excellence prize, the Award of the President of the National IT Industry Promotion Agency, and 24 teams receiving excellence prizes, the Award of the Chairman of the Korea Radio Promotion Association and the awards of the sponsoring companies’ representatives. The total prize money amounts to about 77 million won.
In the Developer Division, the grand prize went to the team Gamut, which presented a hyper-realistic fashion SNS service combining AI and 3D technology titled ‘A Hyper-Realistic 3D SNS for Your Own Fashion Digging,’ and to the team Two Code, which developed a web-based science experiment and inquiry learning service called ‘Ans2Quest.’ In the Creator Division, the grand prize went to the team Jeongjun People, which created ‘Maple Guardians: Protect the Maple Tree’ using MapleStory characters, and to SSAMPPONG Studio, which presented ‘Koreapunk 2026,’ a third-person shooting game set in the alleyways of Korea.
The top excellence prize went to teams including JARVIS, which developed the ‘JARVIS’ service that lets users collaborate with AI through gestures and voice in a mixed reality (MR) environment based on the Meta Quest 3, and BODA, which presented ‘SeeSay,’ a hearing-support service that provides subtitles and alerts through AI glasses. These were cited as examples of how technology can expand into disability support and everyday convenience.
At the ceremony, the awards were followed by presentations and exhibitions of the winning teams’ achievements, giving attendees a chance to experience the outstanding services and content firsthand.
The Ministry of Science and ICT will not stop at the awards but will provide follow-up support for employment, startups and commercialization. It will offer internships linked to sponsoring companies for interested winners among the adult-category teams, along with startup consulting. Gamut, the adult-category grand prize winner in the Developer Division, will also be given the opportunity to take part in the K-Digital Grand Championship.
Nam Cheol-ki, Director-General for Software Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said, ‘Through this competition, young developers and creators showed their ability to turn creative ideas into real services and content,’ adding, ‘We will continue to strengthen cooperation with private companies to steadily discover and nurture outstanding talent in the AI and virtual convergence fields, and to actively support them so that it leads to employment, startups and commercialization.’
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