Background

Adventure with Tap is a series of text-based adventure experience. As people often tap randomly on desks, we want to make the random taps meaningful. In Adventure with Tap, the story is delivered using audio/sound only and the player can control characters, make decisions and influence the environment by tapping different fingers and combinations.

Prototype Purpose

As the screen medium have been existed and explored for a long time, yet we believe some non-screen medium can be very promising when combining with Tap. There are already a lot of games based on home assistants and can be controlled by voices. However, we believe voice detection can sometimes be vague, inaccurate and has no instant feedback.

Design Details

Platform: Tap + Any device that can play sound and connect Tap

We designed a story about finding a lost dog “Jake”. The story isn’t totally linear and has two endings. There is a map about our story below. At the beginning of the experience, the guest would wake up around the point A and hear the environment sound and narratives telling him/her where he/she is. By tapping, the guest can also search pockets, look around or stand up. Additionally, some special interaction are designed for tap according to people’s tapping habits. For example: the guests can tap index finger and middle finger in turns to walk, and every tap will trigger footstep sound.

Implementation Details

We considered many users’ different respondings and interactions to make sure the experience can go fluently even they tapped the wrong combinations due to Tap’s accuracy.

Sound/audio is the most important part to tell the story. In order to build an immersive experience, there are three different kinds of sound including background music, narratives and sound effects.

Lessons Learned

Feedback is important. There should be sound feedback or narrative feedback after making a choice. Otherwise the guest won’t know that the storyline has changed. The guest can feel the latency, so we should avoid any design that will amplify the problem.

The instructions should be very clear. For example words like “forefingers” should be avoided since it can be understood as “four fingers”. And usually, if there are two choices, the guest will choose the first one, and it might because of the impatience or the unawareness of the second choice.

Future Possibilities

It could be perfect for games before sleeping and games for relaxation. No screen device means you can do this anywhere, with or without light and with any postures you want. It requires less energy. It is also perfect for some certain scenarios, for example, when people are on the airplane or when people are driving.

Combing with other devices are also great opportunities. The speaker can not only be smart phones, but also speak assistants.