Walk in your friend’s footsteps and uncover their memories during your city trip! While exploring, Footsteps gives you a new way to experience your friends’ online social media content, as they are unexpectedly appearing near you, at the location they were posted. Follow an emergent experience to find and match the same shot.
During the 2025 XRCC hackathon, the Creative Capybaras Team (Rens van der Werff, Noa Barneveld and I), were part of the Travel and Destination track, with the client being the German Tourism Department. In four days, we created this idea and prototype from scratch, using Unity.
Description
Footsteps is a Mixed Reality experience that enriches your urban travelling. During your trip, the application runs in the background, to detect if you are nearing a location where your online friends have posted pictures before. Without interrupting or obscuring your view, a subtle trail of footsteps guide you through the city, forming an emergent, completely optional, hunt. When getting close enough, you are prompted to find and replicate the original picture using tracked hand poses, with the gamified goal to get as close as possible. After your attempt, more details about the original post are displayed, allowing you to relate and connect with your friends.
In the future
- 3rd party social platform integrations (e.g. Polarsteps, Instagram)
- GPS Tracking
- Using LLMs to extract relevant post snippets
Target device
Future iteration of Meta ray-ban or similar glasses, featuring overlays, GPS, spatial tracking and hand gestures.
Current build
Runs on Meta Quest 3. The full MR version works, but is tied to a physical location (Amersfoort, NL), due to the navigation map and the picture locations. We submitted a VR-only build, emulating the experience.
