Week 7 – We Made 11 Prototypes!

Halves are coming!

On Monday we had Anthony come to the project room and he tried many of our demos. He very much enjoyed the CAVE experience and he thought that it would be better if the cooldown time of the lighting is shorter.

He played the piano tutorial and since he had been playing piano before it is rather intuitive for him. He also enjoyed the orchestra, running and biking game a lot. What’s more, we talked a lot about Star Wars and C3PO which was more than interesting. We are all extremely excited about the coming new Star Wars movie.

This week, we finished the Piano tutorial app for Daydream, which looks pretty fancy. This is a demo to demonstrate the possibility of performance tutorial. In this App, you have to use the right fingering skills to activate the piano keys.

We also have an orchestra game for Tap which supports local multiplayer. One player uses a mobile phone and one Tap as the conductor, and other players can play different instruments. This is more like a recreation game and no matter how you tap, the result music piece would always be pretty satisfying.

One thing we finished this week is a demo of what a fully audio-based game for Tap could be. We are wondering what would it be like for a game to be played with only sound. And here is our game. The audio delivered story is about finding a lost dog and there are some interactions designed for tap, for example, guest can tap index finger and middle finger to walk from point A to point B. By tapping, they can also make decisions on which way to go. Now Chang will introduce how Tap works with other devices.

As for the playtesting, we have the second playtesting on Wednesday. We playtested all of our new demos including running, biking, orchestra, piano tutorial, audio adventure, and the CAVE experience. We did get a lot of interesting playtesting results. For example, it is really surprising that different people have really different ‘prime’ finger for the action tapping.

And on Thursday, we paid a visit to Chris Harrison who is an assistant professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU. We showed him some of our demos and he seemed to be pretty familiar with the technology. We got some extremely valuable feedback from him and we would like to have a serious discussion about it after the halves.

As for the remaining of the week, we are all preparing for the half slides. Our schedule for the half presentation is on next Tuesday and we are all very excited.