PortalVR Motion brings Wii-style motion controls to PC, bringing natural motion controls to thousands of games and creative apps on SteamVR — using the phone already in your pocket as a fully tracked 6DoF controller. Joy-Cons and VR controllers work too.
Already have a license? Download PortalVR Motion
Plug your phone into your PC, grip it, and hold Volume‑Down to calibrate — PortalVR Motion then tracks it in full 6DoF. The phone becomes the controller, with an on‑screen trigger, grip, and buttons. Works on Android and iOS. PortalVR Motion uses your iPhone's FaceID camera to track Joy-Con controllers in 3D — no base stations, no extra gear. Plug a Quest or PICO into your PC — or use paired Index controllers or Vive wands — and PortalVR Motion pipes the native tracked controllers straight into SteamVR.
Watch how to play 2-minute setup videos
Motion now tracks your head, face, and hands with your camera and drives your avatar live in VRChat. Look around, grin, wave — you show up, expressions and all, no headset required.
Motion runs on hardware you probably already own. Easiest of all: just your phone — now a fully tracked 6DoF controller. Prefer Joy-Cons or VR controllers? Those work too.
Your phone tracks itself in full 6DoF and becomes the controller — held in a grip, with a trigger, grip, and buttons on the screen. Android or iOS.
Your iPhone's FaceID camera tracks the Joy-Cons — and your hands — in 6 DoF, so full finger articulation comes through. No base stations, no headset.
Use a VR headset's native tracked controllers as the tracking source — Quest or PICO over USB, or paired Index controllers or Vive wands.
Motion renders genuine stereoscopic depth — so the latest glasses-free 3D monitors and AR glasses show every SteamVR title in real, eye-popping 3D.
Sit at a Samsung Odyssey 3D and get true stereoscopic depth right on the desk — eye-tracked, with no glasses and no headset.
Wear a pair of XREAL or VITURE AR glasses for a giant floating screen with full stereoscopic depth. Plug in over USB-C and play in 3D anywhere.
Motion registers as a SteamVR runtime, so any title that runs in SteamVR sees standard tracked controllers and launches normally — from Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx to VRChat, Gravity Sketch, and the long tail of indie experiments.
From action and rhythm to creative tools and sketchpads — Motion plugs into SteamVR, so anything that runs there runs here.
We're still exploring which titles work best — Join the Discord to help us find the gems.
Grab it for yourself on Steam — or license the tracking engine behind it for your own product.
Play thousands of SteamVR titles with the phone already in your pocket — no headset, no base stations.
Want to use PortalVR Motion commercially? Whether you're a startup that needs a few seats for testing, QA, and development, or you want to build Motion into your own product, contact our team for licensing options or scoped integrations.
License Motion across your company for testing, QA, demos, and day-to-day development — startups welcome.
Ship Motion under your own name, UI, and store presence — your product, our engine underneath.
Run on our standalone stack with no Steam or SteamVR install required — ideal for kiosks, fixed installs, and demos.
Our own OpenXR runtime feeds phone, Joy-Con, and VR-controller 6DoF tracking straight into your VR app.
Thousands of SteamVR titles, played with the phone already in your pocket — no headset, no base stations. Get it on Steam and you're playing in minutes.
At minimum, a Windows PC capable of running SteamVR and a phone. The simplest setup is just your phone — it tracks itself in full 6DoF and becomes the controller, on Android or iOS. Have Joy-Cons? Use an iPhone on a stand facing you plus a pair of Joy-Con controllers. Either way: no headset, no base stations, no extra trackers. For true stereoscopic 3D, wear XREAL or VITURE AR glasses, or use a glasses-free 3D monitor like the Samsung Odyssey 3D.
On Android, the phone controller uses ARCore for self-tracking, so your phone needs to be an ARCore-supported device — most phones from the last several years qualify. iPhones have no such requirement.
A few accessories we recommend:
Don't have any Joy-Cons yet? Grab a pair of Joy-Con 2 controllers on Amazon.
Motion also supports using Quest, PICO, Index, or Vive controllers as a tracking source — extremely high precision via the headset's onboard optical tracking (Quest / PICO) or Lighthouse base stations (Index / Vive). Quest or PICO need developer mode and a USB connection to your PC; Index controllers and Vive wands work as-is.
Lighthouse-tracked controllers work best of all — Valve Index controllers and HTC Vive wands. Because they're tracked by external base stations rather than cameras on a headset, they stay locked in across your entire room: no camera to keep them in front of, no dropouts when you reach wide, behind you, or overhead. If you have a Lighthouse setup, use it.
Among headset-tracked controllers (mobile VR headsets like Quest and PICO, whose cameras track the controllers optically), Quest 2 controllers work best. Their tracking rings give the headset's cameras a big, unambiguous target, so they hold high-quality tracking even at arm's length and toward the edges of the camera's view. Newer ringless controllers are more prone to losing tracking when held out of the headset's sightline.
The single biggest tip: place your iPhone directly in front of you, not off to one side. The depth camera tracks best when it's facing you head-on. Next, make sure your hands are well lit — Motion locates your hands first and uses their pose to estimate where the controllers are, so dim or backlit hands hurt overall tracking. Drop the phone on a stand near the front edge of your desk so nothing on the desk blocks the camera, and angle it so the lens looks toward your body and hands rather than tilted up at your face.
From there, distance is the dial — for titles that need fine finger control, keep your hands closer to the camera so Motion can track each finger; for wider arm-motion titles like Beat Saber, scoot back so the camera can see your full upper body. If you have an iPhone Pro, switch to the rear LiDAR camera for those wider, full-body titles — it gives noticeably better depth at longer distances than the front FaceID camera.
Use Joy-Con 2 if you can — the built-in magnetometer keeps rotational tracking steadier.
If you want the highest tracking fidelity available, plug in a Quest or PICO headset and use its controllers as the tracking source — the headset's onboard cameras provide excellent optical precision. Put it in developer mode and connect it to your PC over USB. Index controllers and Vive wands also work as a tracking source via Lighthouse base stations.
