The school has started and so has our new semester project. Our project is focusing on a novelty interactive input device known as TAP from TAP Systems INC. TAP is a wearable, knuckle-shaped device that users put each finger into its sensing area. By tapping fingers on hard surfaces, the device will register the tap and by default, map to a certain letter in the alphabet, a number or a symbol. In short, it is a keyboard with a reimagined input method. Besides the keyboard functionality, TAP also includes a mouse cursor so that the device can also be used as a mouse for computers/tablets.
Our team consists six members from Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University.
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.
And our project’s advisors are ETC faculty Brenda Bakker Harger and Ricardo Washington.
For the first week of this semester, our team mainly focus on setting up the project and housekeeping. We have been notified that although Tap System provides us with their products, they are not supervising our project and thus leaving freedom of creativity to us. We begin our brainstorming by inspecting the device and its exemplary apps.
We did some research independently about the accessible input methods related to tapping and here is the list of ideas we came up with:
- Yutian: Music utility app or entertainment experience
- Ruoxi: A screen-less typing experience with only audio feedback (and tactile feedback from TAP)
- Yuqiao: Using multiple Leap Motion to track hand position and TAP for accurate hand-tracking plus tapping
- Jiajun: Tapping on different surfaces for different usage, Combining with AR
- Chang: UX Research for TAP / TAP AR storytelling
We will decide the first choice next Tuesday since next Monday is Martin Luther King day and then we can start our exploration and prototyping.
During the first week, we also settled down much logistic stuff. First of all, after several modifications, we have finalized our core hour schedules. We tried our best to accommodate everyone’s personal course schedule and the ETC timetable. And for the roles on the team, it is a little bit tricky for us. Currently, there are two programmers(Chang and Jiajun), two designers(Ruoxi and Erhan), one sound artist(Yutian) and one producer(Yuqiao) on the team. As you can see, we don’t have any dedicated 3D artist on our team because of the fact that nobody on our team has a professional background of 3D art which might potentially be a problem for us. We would like to respect the preference of everyone but in the meantime, we have to make compromisations. The best solution we came up with is to let the three people who have the ability for 3D modeling take turns to fo the job.
So that’s all for week one, which seems to be a great start.