Star Keeper — Spatial Music Sculptor

Elevator Pitch

Star Keeper is a seated, hands-only spatial music sculpting experience for Meta Quest 2. You sit before the Star Keeper's deep indigo etched-light stage in a living painted cosmos. Orbs of celestial light rest before you, silent until touched. Reach out and shape them: pull, stretch, and place them freely in three-dimensional space. Each orb carries an individual musical stem—bass, percussion, arpeggios, harmony, and lead melody in D major. Sculpting the orb alters its timbre, filter cutoff, volume, and harmonic presence. Release an orb, and it stays where you set it, sending a wave of light along the stage's etched star-chart outlines and continuing to sing in harmony with the cosmos.

Core Pillars

1. Hands-Only Tactile Sculpting

No controllers required — and no finger-closure gesture required. Star Keeper is driven entirely by native optical hand tracking using proximity touch-to-hold: bring a hand within 10cm of an orb to hold it, pull to stretch and sculpt it, and release with a gentle flick (0.65 m/s) or by simply moving your hand away past 18cm (80mm hysteresis, so a held orb never drops by accident). Two hands near the same orb stretch it together. The interaction was designed for reduced unilateral finger dexterity — it was calibrated on-device against a hand that cannot fully close, and it asks for reach and touch, never a precise finger clasp. Seated, no time pressure, no menus: pause and resume exactly where you left off, and every sculpted orb keeps its shape, its place, and its sound when you return.

2. Living Musical Painting & Etched-Light Stage

Rendered inside a living oil-painting dome inspired by classical impressionism and celestial fantasy. The palette features a deep twilight celestial envelope, a deep indigo etched-light stage (with reactive star-glow gold and soft blue outlines pulsing on the beat and carrying each set-down bloom), a glowing miniature planet at its center with the draped hooded Keeper standing on its crown (two glowing eyes inside his hood shadow, brass lantern in hand), and a six-minute rotating Flower of Life rosette overhead.

3. Spatial Sound Staging

Five musical stems in D major at 100 BPM. Each orb operates as a dynamic acoustic instrument, carrying one stem of the bed:

• Melody: Bright melodic focus, opening filter on stretch.
• Texture: Warm spatial aura enveloping the listener.
• Bass: Deep fundamental resonance anchoring the planet stage.
• Sparkle: Cascading celestial sequences.
• Drums: Rhythmic heartbeat driving the celestial cadence.

Summed with strict ITU-R BS.1770 gain staging ensuring >= 1.30 dB headroom under 0 dBFS across all active simultaneous stems.

4. True World & Session Persistence

Sculpted orbs never reset to arbitrary origins. Once sculpted, an orb preserves its position, deformation, and audio parameters indefinitely. The world persists across application restarts and pause/resume cycles with bit-identical fidelity via local JSON session serialization.

Technical Specifications

• Target Platform: Meta Quest 2 (Android standalone, 72 Hz native).
• Engine: Unity 6000.6.3f1 (Universal Render Pipeline).
• Tracking: XR Hands / Oculus Hand Tracking Subsystem (hands-only, no controllers required).
• Audio Architecture: Custom DSP engine with real-time biquad filtering, Butterworth low-pass tracking, and stereo spatialization.

Built With

• c#
• hand-tracking
• unity