Chime bars for bare hands

Eight coloured bars on a walnut frame: touch one with a fingertip and it dips, glows and rings its note.

A capture of the project running in Graspable's emulated headset. A set of eight anodised chime bars from red to pink on a walnut frame in a dark room, seen from the headset: a tracked right hand touches the blue A bar with its index fingertip and the bar glows, the left hand waits beside the frame, and a dark panel above has a Volume slider, a Sustain switch and a Play a tune button.

Open the appContinue from it in GraspableRuns in a browser, on a Quest or a Vision Pro.

The request, word for word

This is the text that was sent to the agent to start the project. Nothing was edited for this page.

Replace the starter with an instrument I play with my bare hands: a set of chime bars, like a large glockenspiel. Eight metal bars lie side by side on a wooden frame in front of me, 50 cm away at a height of one metre, tilted slightly towards me: the notes C D E F G A B C of one octave. The bars get shorter from left (28 cm) to right (18 cm), each is 4 cm wide and 1 cm thick with rounded ends and two small fixing pins, and each has its own anodised colour from deep red through orange, yellow, green, teal, blue and violet to pink. The note name is engraved near the lower end of each bar in dark letters 2 cm tall, sitting clearly above the bar's surface so it never flickers. When I touch a bar with a fingertip of either hand it rings at once with a clear bell tone at the right pitch (made in code: a sine with soft overtones and a decay of about two seconds; faster touches are louder), the bar dips a few millimetres and springs back, glows brightly in its colour, and a soft ring of light spreads from it across the frame and fades. Several bars can ring together. Behind the bars, a narrow dark panel, tilted towards me, with large readable controls: a Volume slider, a Sustain toggle (when on, notes ring twice as long), and a "Play a tune" button that plays "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" on the bars by itself, lighting each bar as it sounds, so I can follow it with my fingers. Looks matter: brushed anodised metal with real reflections and soft highlights, a frame of oiled walnut with visible grain (drawn in code), standing on a slim black stand on the floor. A calm dark room: charcoal floor with a soft pool of neutral white light under the instrument, a deep blue-grey background a little lighter at the horizon, a soft shadow under the bars. My hands must be clearly visible and well lit. Nothing may look like flat coloured rectangles. It has to work in VR in the emulated headset with hand tracking, with controllers, and on the desktop with the mouse.

How it went

Runs
2 runs: the request above, then one follow-up request. A run ends only when the project builds and loads in a real browser without errors.
Started from
The Hands & Spatial UI template: Panels, buttons and sliders you pinch and poke with your bare hands, ready to become a dashboard, an instrument or a tool.
Notes and credits
The first build froze the picture on the first fingertip touch; one follow-up request fixed that and made the frame walnut. The note names engraved on the bars are dark and hard to read. AI: Graspable agent (build), Claude Code (follow-up).

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