With the development and the popularization of sports dance, sports dance teaching has become a required elective course in universities. Sports dance can not only improve students' comprehensive quality, but also affect college students' healthy psychology. The use of VR (Virtual Reality) technology in dance education will definitely develop and promote dance education. This paper studies an effective feature extraction method for the characteristics of dance movements based on VR. The edge features of all video images in each segment are accumulated into one image, and the directional gradient histogram features are extracted from it. The results show that compared with the current robust regression method and cascade regression method, our method has higher positioning accuracy on the pollution test set, and more than 75% of the sample errors in this method are within 0.1. This also verifies the effectiveness of this motion recognition algorithm for dance motion recognition. Dance can effectively resist the psychological barriers of college students and improve their comprehensive quality.