Inspiration
Fingerboarding has always been a desk game. It's what skaters do in class, at work, or when it's raining and they can't get to the park. Mixed reality let me take that literally: the surfaces around you become the skatepark. I wanted something you can pick up for five minutes without clearing a room, but that still feels like a real session: small, tactile, and all about landing the next trick. As a dad, I also wanted it to be something I could share with my son.
What it does
Desk Session turns your desk, table or floor, or a surface you draw in mid-air, into a fingerboard park in mixed reality on Meta Quest.
- It all starts with a peace sign. No controllers. Make a peace sign and your two fingers become your legs on the board, just like a real fingerboard.
- Your space is the spot. The game understands your room, so the park sits on your real desk, table or floor.
- No desk? Draw one. Wherever you are, you can draw your own skate surface in the air right in front of you and start skating. It's been tested on an airplane seat and it works.
- Skate in seconds. New players start with a ready-made park, and four more are a poke away. Then switch to edit mode and build it out your way: every piece lights up, and so do your hands.
- Skate together. With co-location, players in the same room see the same park in the same place, so you can build and skate a spot together.
- Four mini-games. Game of S.K.A.T.E., Follow the Line, Trick Attack and the Shreadmill, all playable solo or in multiplayer.
- Four ways to ride. Skateboard, Pro Fingerboard, Hoverboard and Snowboard.
- 20 original deck designs and finger shoes to unlock and collect.
- Progression through skating. Skate park pieces you haven't ridden before to unlock new parts, decks, shoes and boards, so your park grows as you do.
- Film your session. Set up a tripod or drone camera to capture your best lines, with everyone's hands and shoes in the shot.
- Day, night and snow. Change the mood of your park.
- Made for short sessions. You can play seated at your desk, and a session fits into a coffee break.
How I built it
Desk Session is a solo project, built in Unity for Meta Quest using:
- Meta Core SDK for hand tracking and core XR features
- Meta Interaction SDK for hand visuals and poke-to-press menus
- MR Utility Kit (MRUK) to understand the room and anchor the park to real surfaces
- Passthrough so you're always skating in your own space
- Shared spatial anchors and co-location so players share one park in the same physical space
I built on what I learned shipping Kraken's Rampage, my mixed reality naval combat game, especially around anchoring gameplay to real surfaces and keeping MR content readable in a real room.
Challenges we ran into
- Occluded fingers. In a fingerboard pose, your fingers often block each other or sit behind your hand, which is the hardest case for hand tracking. I had to design the controls to handle brief tracking loss so a missed frame doesn't cost you a trick.
- Keeping it stable and fun. At fingerboard scale, small physics errors look huge. The work was finding where the board should behave realistically and where it should help you out, so it feels like a real board without becoming frustrating. That balance had to hold across four very different board types.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The first time my son and I connected through co-location and built a park together on our living room floor. Seeing the same ramps in the same spot and skating them together was nothing short of magic. That's the moment I knew this was more than a desk toy.
I also skated a session from an airplane seat on a surface I drew in the air. If it works at 30,000 feet, it works anywhere.
And I'm proud of building a fully hand-tracked, co-located MR game solo, with four mini-games, four board types and 20 original deck designs, from code to design to branding.
What we learned
- Hand-tracking input needs to be designed around what the tracking can actually see, not around a perfect hand.
- At small scale, how a trick feels matters more than accurate physics.
- Co-location changes everything. Shared physical space makes MR feel social in a way that online multiplayer doesn't.
- Tying unlocks to skating new pieces gives players a reason to keep building and exploring their park.
What's next for Desk Session: Fingerboard Sim
- More park pieces, deck designs and board types
- Brands and sponsors
- More mini-games and challenges
- Sharing your parks, spots and clips
- Online play alongside local co-location
- Launch on the Meta Horizon Store
Built With
- cinema4d
- claude
- unity
