Footsteps - An Emergent Social XR Travel Experience

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.

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.

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.