Inspiration
BoxWherever started as a controller workout: punch targets timed to your own music while standing inside a real 360-degree Street View scene, anywhere on Earth. We wanted the same workout to work for people who cannot or would rather not hold controllers, and for people who cannot stand, duck and turn through a full room-scale session. The Meta VR Start competition's hands-first, seated brief matched exactly what we wanted to build next.
What it does
BoxWherever is now fully playable with hands alone, end to end. Your tracked hands become the gloves, and jabs, crosses, hooks and uppercuts are read from your hands. In the menus you point with Meta's own hand laser and pinch to choose. Turning your left palm toward you and pinching pauses the song, and the pause menu has pinch buttons for target and platform height, so nothing needs a thumbstick. Scroll buttons page through a long song library, and the same gesture gets you out of a song that is still loading.
Seated Mode is a separate accessibility option in the main menu. It removes ducking, keeps every target coming from one portal straight ahead (no turning), and drops stance switches, so the whole workout happens within easy reach from a chair. New players get five included songs right away, with no account needed. Controller play is unchanged for anyone who prefers it.
How we built it
The app is one Unity 6 project and one Meta Horizon Store app for both controllers and hands. Hand poses and punch velocity come from Unity XR Hands (OpenXR hand tracking). The menu laser, pinch and left-hand menu gesture use Meta's hand-tracking aim data, which the Quest home screen also uses, so pointing feels the way Quest owners already expect. Seated Mode re-expresses each song's choreography around the starting direction, so the punch pattern is preserved while the turns are removed. Workouts are generated on our server at boxwherever.com from the player's music, with beat analysis choosing the punches.
Challenges we ran into
Adding hand support at first broke controller song selection: some OpenXR hand-interaction profiles place hand devices on the same input slots the game reads controllers from. We diagnosed it from on-device logs, kept those profiles off, and rebuilt hand input so the controller path stayed exactly as before. A finger-direction pointer made pinching impossible, so we moved to Meta's own aim ray. A clenched fist thrown as a hook can look like the menu gesture, so the pause gesture now requires a still hand.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Hands-first play and Seated Mode shipped to every BoxWherever owner on the Meta Horizon Store on October 1, 2026 (version 0.170.0), inside the competition window, without changing the controller experience our existing players rely on.
What we learned
Hands-first is more than swapping an input source: every control that lived on a button or thumbstick needs a visible, pinchable replacement, and accessibility options are clearer as their own mode than as a side effect of how someone holds their hands.
What's next for BoxWherever
Tuning the menu and portal layout for the narrower field of view of Meta VR Glasses and testing on the device once it is available, more seated-friendly workouts, and further accessibility settings.
Try it
- Judges' build (Competition release channel): https://www.meta.com/s/5901CqFgz
- Meta Horizon Store: https://www.meta.com/experiences/boxwherever/1738086587225035/
- Website: https://boxwherever.com
Track: Gaming · Division: Adapted / Significantly Updated Experience
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