A Stepmania DDR Dance-Pad emulator using SteamVR with Vive Trackers. This program was made by Tekki and me in only one day with almost zero knowledge about SteamVR and C++.
See the software (version 0.9) in action (together with Stepmania 5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mgoQEJnbRI
It uses third party source code from SteamVR, as well as code snippets from various websites (check source code for details). We do not claim any of that, do whatever you want with it. This source code is very ugly and we are aware of that, but it works.
We hope that someone adds a UI in the future for usability. The only purpose of this program was to have a proof-of-concept that this is possible and works with Stepmania. This tool requieres Steam VR being up and running before you start it. You need 2 Vive Trackers on your feet or on your legs (the trackers being on your ancles & facing forward is recommended).
You should have a 3 x 3 tile area with 30cm x 30cm tiles which acts as your Stepmania dancepad (does not need to exists IRL but it is recommended to put markers on the floor for your own reference). You need at least 2 corners (top right and bottom left, e.g. 134cm apart) for calibration. The distance varies the total size of your dance pad. It is recommended to have the middle pile out of a material that you can feel under your feet, e.g. a cardboard cutout with double-tape on the bottom to stick to the floor.
After startup of this program, you have 10 seconds to stay front-facing on your two calibration points (see Dancepad_scematic.jpg) with your trackers aligned over your calibration points. Afterward, you have 10 seconds to step back with both feets onto your middle plate to calibrate the tracker height. Those instructions are also shown on screen. This program does not calculate any offset for your feet, it uses the raw tracker position for everything! As soon as StepMania is being started, the calibration is finished and you should be able to play. If you start the program from within visual studio, you will be able to see the debug logs which is helpful. Else just download the StepmaniaVR folder from Github and run the StemaniaVR.exe from within that folder.
The sourcecode can be found in github under /StepmaniaVR/sourcecode/samples/ Just open this file in Visual Studio: /StepmaniaVR/sourcecode/samples/StepmaniaVR.sln The relevant sourcecode can be found in samples/hellovr_opengl/StepmaniaVR_DancePad_Main.cpp which is then also shown in visual studio on the right side.
IMPORTANT: There is currently no detection in which way you are facing, so you might need to turn around for the calibration (change left and right feet) if right/left and up/down keys are wrong. Also you maybe have to run the .exe twice unless you start it from within Visual Studio, we have no idea why that is sometimes the case.
This program is incredible fast, resulting in multiple key presses due to jitter in tracking. Because of that, you should definitely set the "Input debounce time" in Stepmania to e.g. 10ms-20ms (or whatever works best for you). To do this, open Stepmania and go to Options -> Input Options -> Advanced -> "Input debounce time" and set it to 20ms or play around with it, I haven't done much testing as I find 10-20ms to work fine for me.