Do you like magic? Do you envy the power of mother nature? Do you want to change the weather by just snapping a finger?
Introducing “Utapia”, a CAVE + Tap experience where you have control of the world.
Utapia
“Utapia” is an emotional experience where the guest inside the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) can interact with the environment, in this case, change time and weather, by doing some simple gestures like waving a hand, clenching a fist, or snapping a finger.
Tap
It’s like magic, right? But it’s not magic, it’s Tap.
I don’t know if you noticed, in the video, the guest is wearing something on his right hand. It’s a wearable keyboard called “Tap”. Tap can be used on many platforms as the input device. It can detect the “tapping” movement and use it to type English or other languages. It can be used to play games on mobile devices and AR/VR. It can even serve as a mouse if you want it to.
In “Utapia”, the guest uses Tap to communicate with the environment. Whenever the guest does something that triggered the “tapping” event, the program will react by changing the scene or settings, like making a lightning strike.
The CAVE
CAVE stands for “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment”. It’s one kind of virtual reality environment, but instead of using a headset, it uses three or more giant screens that surround the guest to create an immersive experience.
We are very fortunate to have a CAVE room right at CMU ETC. I’ve seen people making many crazy games with it. But finding a suitable input device for CAVE has always been a problem. Most of the time people use the HTC Vive controllers. It works, but your hand will get tired soon.
“Utapia” is an experiment we made to explore how well does Tap perform as a potential input device for the CAVE. We did some playtesting with “Utapia” and found out that it has some pros and cons. The advantage of using Tap as the input device for CAVE is that it’s really light, after wearing it for a while, you would not even feel it. And that creates a more immersive experience for the guest. The disadvantage is that the function it can perform is somewhat limited. That’s the tradeoff.
So if you are designing a CAVE experience that does not need many complicated interactions, Tap can be a good choice for you.
Project Houdini
I hear you ask, who made this, and why?
This semester, I’m working in an interdisciplinary team at CMU ETC called “Houdini”. Project Houdini is a discovery project working with Tap and explore the potential use scenarios for this device. The project aims to explore the user’s input behavior and interpret that behavior into new experiences by creating multiple prototypes.
So far, we’ve created 11 prototypes, and “Utapia” is just one of them. If you are interested, you can visit our project website at http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/houdini/. We update our progress every week.
TAP SYSTEMS INC is our client. They gave us lots of freedom to try whatever crazy ideas we have. It seems that they like what we’re doing. They even put the video for “Utapia” on their official youtube channel. And it got 17K views in just three days.
We met our client in person at SXSW, it seems the Tap is very popular, people are lining up to buy it.
In the picture above, Ruoxi is holding our team photo.
That’s my teammates this semester:
Yuqiao Zeng is the producer of team Houdini.
Erhan Qu is a game designer and assistant producer of the team.
Ruoxi Li is an interaction designer.
Chang Liu and Jiajun Tan are two programmers in the team.
Yutian Zheng is the sound designer/sound engineer of the team.
Fun
I feel very lucky to work with my wonderful teammates this semester. It’s really the best team I can wish for, and we’re having so much fun with Tap!
The End
If you like our project, you can always visit our website. If you want to reach us, welcome to shoot us an email at etc.houdini@gmail.com.
Thank you very much for reading :)
