CMU project leaders from HCII and ETC will be documenting ChairJam 1.0 process and outcomes, both for academic research and to share the concept.
Our hope is to showcase the outcomes at festivals and conferences, after additional development on the prototypes by CMU students in HCII and the ETC.
We'll be collecting feedback to the event from participants and stakeholders so that future ChairJam iterations can be improved.
Festival We put a lot of thought into preparing for the ETC Fall Festival on Friday. We wanted to update Robo Rampage such that we could run it for the Festival participants. However, we ended up not being able to do so.. The technical issues we encountered were too significant for us to manage and…
Soft Opening was this Monday, followed by a general review on Tuesday and then Thanksgiving Break. Faculty visited from 9 to around 12 to review the work we’ve done this semester. We sat down with them to discuss our three deliverables – ChairJam, the ChairJam Kit, and our prototyping work. The main feedback we got…
Prototype Update We’ve got a brief update on the development of our newer prototype, titled Robo Rampage. We have added in a few more features to give the player direction and understanding in the game. Specifically, we updated the shooting mechanic to feel smoother, we gave the robot a health bar for clarity, and adjusted…
This week we made a new prototype – Robo Rampage. Robo Rampage is a co-op mixed-ability VR game. Our main goals with the game, as stated in last week’s blog, is to promote teamwork, interactions between the players, and some quick, fun action. These things will hopefully combat the idea that wheelchair-users are overly or…
This past Saturday was Playtest Day. We had a significant number of playtesters come by and try out our experiences. We got a decent mix of young and old playtesters in the room on our wheelchair. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get any actual wheelchair-users on Playtest Day. We had the playtesters that were there…
Playtest Day is coming up this Saturday, so our main focus this week was on developing a few prototyping ideas we have. We weren’t aware of whether or not any playtesters would be wheelchair users on Playtest Day, so we planned to ask a few participants from ChairJam to separately playtest with us soon. That…
To be honest, we took a bit of a break this week. The lead up to ChairJam was a sprint to get everything in place for the event, and then we participated in the event all last weekend. Taking the chance to slow down and smell the roses for a couple days was an opportunity…
ChairJam ChairJam was this weekend! The event we have all been waiting for has come to pass. There were a few last minute details to clean up before the event, like making sure we had the food orders prepared and all the materials in place, but no major disasters took place. We did have a…
Halves Presentation Most of this week was spent making our Halves presentation. We need to encapsulate our journey and learnings up to this point. This means going over everything we did, but framing it to specifically to showcase our learnings on accessibility and event planning. We’ve definitely encountered a fair share of problems in the…
Visits Our registered participant count is too low for our tastes, so this week we made an effort to raise it by distributing flyers physically and visiting some organizations in person. We hope this will encourage sign-ups more than a simple email. Heather and Parker visited the Human Engineering and Research Laboratories with UPitt. They…