Inspiration
VibeStep started as a mobile dance maker: you pose a 2D figure joint by joint, lay music on the same grid, and post it to a shared feed. It reached Google Play in September 2026.
On a phone, though, you make a dance with your thumb. Dancing is something your body already knows how to do. A headset that tracks your hands could let people make a dance by moving, then share it with friends on their phones.
What it does
VibeStep VR is a hands-only companion to the mobile app. It uses the same accounts, the same feed, and the same dances.
- Watch. Scroll a spatial feed of real danc
VibeStep VR is a hands-only companion to the mo accounts, the same feed, and the same dances.
- Watch. Scroll a spatial feed of real dances posted from phones and headsets. Music is synthesized on-device from each post's instrument loop, and the dancer moves in time with it.
- Record a move. A figure faces you like a mirror. After a countdown it copies your head and hands and captures eight keyframes, which are saved to your motion library in the same format the mobile app uses.
- Hum a melody. Hum for eight beats. On-device pitch tracking turns the take into an instrument loop that you can preview, save, and later edit in the mobile sequencer.
- Post. Combine a motion, a song, and a backdrop. Type a title on an in-world keyboard (English or Korean) and publish it publicly or privately.
- React. Leave emoji reactions, read comments, and try outfits on the figure in a fitting room.
Sign-in works without a phone: create an email account inside the headset, or link an existing mobile account with a short code or QR.
How I built it
Unity 6 with URP and OpenXR, using XR Hands for hand tracking. I wrote a small interaction layer instead of using a full interaction toolkit. Thumb–index pinch presses nearby buttons, and an index-finger ray reaches distant panels. Every screen works without controllers.
The motion code (skeleton, codec, body-pose mapping, humming analysis) lives in an assembly that cannot reference XR, so it is tested without a headset. The VR client talks to the existing Go backend throirectory, so mobile and VR never disagree about the data.
Challenges I ran into
- No elbows, no legs. Tracking gives me a hure is built so arm direction alone reads as a pose,ouches and jumps.
- Sign-in without Google Play services. Queso I added email accounts and phone-to-headset linking that land on the same user.
- Pinch precision. Jitter right before a pinch made buttons misfire until I stabilized the pointer at that moment.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
A dance recorded with your body in VR shows up in a friend's phone feed, and a hummed melody opens in the mobile sequencer. It's one community, not a port.
What I learned
Hands-only input rewards fewer, larger targets. Most of my early buttons were sized for a phone, not a fingertip. And testing the motion code without a headset kept the slow device loop for feel, not
What's next for VibeStep VR
Grabbing the figure's joints directly to fine-tgs, and performance profiling for a public Horizon Store launch.
