Add Haptics to the XRI Hand Demo

Add Hapbeat haptic feedback to “Hands Interaction Demo”, the official XR Interaction Toolkit (XRI) sample from Unity. Grabbing, poking, snapping and scrubbing all get haptics.

No Unity needed just to try it

A prebuilt APK is available → Install the XRI Hand Demo APK

What you need

• Unity 6 (6000.0) or later
• XR Interaction Toolkit — verified with 3.3.1
• Hapbeat SDK
• A Hapbeat device — on the same Wi-Fi as the PC running Unity
• A hand-tracking HMD — Quest 3 / 3S etc.

Steps

1. Install the XR Interaction Toolkit

   • Package Manager → Unity Registry
   • Projects created from the VR template already have it

2. From the XRI Samples, import Starter Assets and Hands Interaction Demo

   • They land in Assets/Samples/XR Interaction Toolkit/<version>/Hands Interaction Demo/

3. Install the Hapbeat SDK

   • Package Manager → + → Install package from git URL..., then paste

     https://github.com/Hapbeat/hapbeat-unity-sdk.git

   • To pin a version, append a tag (e.g. #v0.3.0)

4. From the Hapbeat SDK Samples, import XR Helpers and XRI Hand Demo (haptics add-on)

   • Both are required. The former holds the XRI filter components, the latter the EventMap and Kit

5. Open HandsDemoScene.unity

6. Run the menu command Hapbeat > Samples > Augment XRI Hand Demo

   • Places the haptic components and wires them into XRI’s UnityEvents
   • A single Undo reverts everything. Re-running never duplicates anything
   • Logs counts of applied items, skipped items and warnings to the Console as one line

7. Enable the Hand Interaction Profile and the Hand Tracking Subsystem in OpenXR

   • Set them in Project Settings → XR Plug-in Management → OpenXR, under the tab for your build target (Android for standalone Quest, PC for Editor Play over Air Link)
   • Without this you cannot grab. Poking works from finger position alone, but grabbing is a pinch — it needs select input, and the Hand Interaction Profile is what supplies it

8. Put the Hapbeat on the same Wi-Fi and press Play

When you want to review the wiring points

Instead of step 6, run Hapbeat > Samples > Augment XRI Hand Demo (+ diagnostic Event Logger) to log every XRI event on the poke button to the Console.

No Kit deployment required

All 10 entries in the bundled EventMap are CLIP (StreamClip), so the waveforms are streamed from the app. The bundled hand-demo-kit-manifest.json exists to preview the reference intensity in the EventMap. For the difference from FIRE, see Fire vs. Clip — When to Use Each.

When it doesn’t work

Symptom	Fix
HandsDemoEventMap.asset not found	The XRI Hand Demo (haptics add-on) sample is not imported → step 4
The open scene is not the Hands Interaction Demo	Wrong scene, or an XRI version difference. The dialog lists the paths it could not find
Console shows GameObject '…' not found	XRI renamed or moved it. Wire the paths in the warning manually (Trigger Components)
Console shows type '…HapbeatXRGrabFilter' not found	The XR Helpers sample is not imported → step 4
Cannot grab	Enable the Hand Interaction Profile and the Hand Tracking Subsystem → step 7
No haptic feedback	See the connectivity entries in Q&A

License, and why we ship a tool

The Hapbeat SDK distributes only three things — the EventMap, the Kit, and the Editor command that applies the wiring — and does not include the scene itself. Not a single XRI-authored asset is in it.

The XRI samples are covered by the Unity Companion License (UCL). Because ownership of an augmented scene and the obligation to include a copyright notice both come into play, we keep third-party assets out of the SDK.

Shipping a built application (an APK, say) is a different matter: it is exactly the application the UCL contemplates, so it falls within the grant → Install the XRI Hand Demo APK

Next

• Trigger Components — what each applied Trigger component does
• EventMap Window — edit the EventMap to tune the feel