The most important thing for this week is that we have decided the guideline for our team: Project Houdini is a discovery project working with the Tap device, which is a wearable keyboard that can be used on multiple platforms with only one hand. The goal of the project is to explore the innovative use scenarios where the Tap serves as a standalone product or part of an integrated system including but not limited to integration with AR/VR devices. It aims to modify user’s input behavior, improve the input experience of certain user groups and ultimately bring impact to society.
With this guideline in mind, we started our brainstorming and have come up with a lot of ideas. At first, we ideas are just about the ideas themselves and we were not thinking too much about the demographics. On Wednesday, during the faculty meeting, we discussed the demographics and the project metrics. So the tricky part is that the actual demographic group of the TAP device depends on the specific applications. For example, if we develop an input method for Chinese language, then the target demographic is the Chinese speakers. On the other hand, if we develop an educational app for preschool children, then the demographics of the TAP is for small children like 5 or 6 years old who don’t even need to know how to write all 26 letters.
As for the roles and responsibilities of everyone on the team, we rediscussed this issue this week. Since we don’t have any “full time” 3D artist on our team, our project should be more about prototyping and research. And when it is absolutely necessary for us to create the 3D asset, we will cooperate to do the job. The two programmers, game designer and myself, the producer on the team we all played with the TAP API and played with them a little bit. And our sound designer has been working on the sound effects prototyping. Our visual designer has created several versions of our logo and posters.
And one thing we should make clear is that our project is a discovery project and we don’t have the requirements for some specific deliverables. What we are going to do is that we will explore the innovative use cases through prototyping. For the first half of the semester, we will be focusing on the prototypes during the first half and may choose one or more to explore further or making more prototypes in the second half. Our schedule will be on a weekly base and every Monday we will work on the schedule for that week and every Friday we will summarize the work we have accomplished during that week.
So starting from the next week, we will be working on the actual prototypes for the product. What we will also do is that we will try to contact with the sci-fi group of CMU and professor Stuart Candy from the school of design to get some input from them about what could possibly be achieved with the TAP. Very excited about the coming weeks!