I've always had one problem: exercising at home is boring. A treadmill in front of the TV gets old after ten minutes, and outside it's either dark or raining. So I decided to combine the things I enjoy – technology and travel – with exercise. The result is VR Turista (VR Tourist): an app where every real step I take moves me along a real route in Google Street View, and when I put on a VR headset, I'm literally walking that route.
The most interesting part of the story? I'm not a professional programmer. I built the whole thing through vibecoding – explaining to an AI (Claude) what I wanted, testing it, telling it what didn't work, and refining it together step by step.
The idea: work out at home by the PC without getting bored
The goal was simple – move every day, even when I'm sitting at home at my computer. I wanted walking to have a purpose and a destination. Not "walk 10,000 steps", but "today I'll walk from Pamplona to Puente la Reina". Street View already covers a huge number of real roads all over the world, so all I needed was to connect my steps to a position on a route.
How it works
The system has two parts that talk to each other through a shared Firebase database:
- A web VR app – shows the route in Google Street View on a monitor or directly in a VR headset. The more steps I take, the further along the route I get.
- A mobile app (Android) – counts my real steps with the phone's step sensor and writes them to the database. It's also where I pick a route, hit start/stop, and see stats and rewards.
In practice, I put the phone in my pocket, press START, step onto the walking pad, and start moving down the street on screen (or in VR). No manual syncing – steps are automatically converted into a position and distance travelled, proportional to the length of the route.
The upgrade: virtual reality and a walking pad
At first I only followed routes on a monitor. Then came the idea to hook up VR – and it made a huge difference. When I'm walking on the pad and there are real houses, roads and landscapes all around me, my brain really perceives it as a walk. Time flies completely differently, and suddenly I've done several kilometres without it feeling like "exercise".
The routes I've prepared
- Local routes in Bratislava, Slovakia
- The Grand Canyon
- Camino Inglés
- Camino Francés – all 33 stages of the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
Completed stages get a green badge and move to the bottom of the list, so I can immediately see what's still ahead of me.
Gamification – to keep me coming back
To keep the motivation going, I added game elements:
- Points of interest – milestones along the route (landmarks, villages, rivers, the finish). When I reach one, the phone vibrates, reads a short text about the place out loud, and I earn XP.
- 30 levels – from "Couch Potato" all the way up to "OLYMPUS LEGEND".
- Achievements – unlocked by total step count (from 100 up to 1,000,000).
- History – a day-by-day overview of my steps.
What vibecoding taught me
The biggest challenges weren't in the idea but in the details. For example, Android loves to put apps to sleep in the background – and when the phone is lying next to the walking pad with the screen off, the step counter would stop counting. Together with the AI, we solved it with a foreground service, a temporary wake lock while recording, and saving the app's state so steps are never duplicated or lost after a phone restart.
Vibecoding doesn't mean the AI does everything on its own. It means I was the "product manager" and tester – I knew what I wanted, I tried it myself on the walking pad, and I described what needed improving. The AI did the heavy technical lifting. For anyone who has ideas but not years of programming experience, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
Conclusion
A simple wish to move at home without getting bored turned into an app that takes me along real roads around the world every day – virtually for now, but my legs know it's real. If you're wondering whether you could build your own app without a programming background, my answer is: give it a try. And if you have a walking pad at home, maybe we'll meet on the Camino one day.
