Hi, everyone! As a new caller, I’m looking for apps that will help me visualize, practice, and plan contra dances.

The pipe dream is an Oculus/Vision Pro VR app allowing callers to practice calling while virtual dancers follow instructions. VR developers - let's talk!

More realistically, it would be amazing to have something similar to the Taminations app (https://www.tamtwirlers.org/taminations/), but for contra dances instead of squares. The idea is that you could input a sequence of moves and watch the 2D figures perform them.

http://dancekaleidoscope.org.au/dance.html is the closest option I’ve found to this, but it offers only specific full dances and doesn’t let you input individual figures to see them combined. There’s a note on the bottom of that page which says you can download an HTML/Javascript program to animate your own dances, but it seems overly complex to set up (I can’t figure it out on my Mac), and unfriendly for mobile devices.

One last thing – I’m hunting for an iOS app that’s a database of dances. Like “The Caller’s Box” (https://www.ibiblio.org/contradance/thecallersbox/) but for iPhone-sized screens and with offline support. 

Perhaps some of these things don’t yet exist, but I think they would go a long way toward helping new callers. Maybe there are some callers or contra-lovers out there who double as software developers or know someone with skills who could help us and we can create new applications together to boost the next generation of callers.

Any feedback, ideas, or help would be great!

Thank you,

Harrison