Type
CMU ETC Building Virtual Worlds Round 1
Team Project (5 members)
Timeline
2026.09.01 - 2026.09.15 (2 weeks)
Technique
Unity & XBOX Adaptive Controller
My Roles
Programmer; Experience Designer
Description
Tangible Game Interface | XBOX Adaptive Controller
Make a Cup of Tea
Freshly Made is an embodied playful experience created for Round 1 of Building Virtual Worlds at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. The assignment challenged us to build a physical interface using the Xbox Adaptive Controller to perform a given task, and our team’s prompt was “Make a Cup of Tea.” Our team transformed the simple act of making tea into a playful Halloween witchcraft experience. Using 12 adaptive inputs, we built 7 custom tangible ingredient stations, each representing an unusual tea ingredient. Players physically interact with these stations through embodied actions such as squeezing, smashing, slapping, pulling, grinding, and shaking, combining strange ingredients to create their own bizarre magical tea.
Part I: "Tea"— What Are Players Making?
STEP 1 : For the “Tea” part, we started by researching current market in tea on social media platforms such as Instagram and Xiaohongshu. We noticed a growing trend of unusual milk tea products, often marketed toward young adults through novelty and playful creativity. This inspired us to let players create their own bizarre magical tea.
STEP 2 : We then broke down the basic structure of a cup of tea into 3 layers: the tea base, the topping, and the powder.
STEP 3 : Combining these two perspectives, we brainstormed 7 magical ingredients:
1) Tea Base: Pumpkin Juice, Dragon Saliva
2) Toppings: Goose Poop Chocolate, Medusa Snake Cream, Volcano Lava
3) Powders: Turtle Shell Powder, Ore Powder
Part II: "Make"— How Do Players Interact?
For the “Make” part, we focused on turning each ingredient into an intuitive embodied interaction. For each ingredient, we first imagined its characteristics and how it might be physically produced or processed. We then mapped that action to an intuitive bodily gesture, selected the most appropriate controller to simulate the interaction, and finally translated it into a custom physical interface. Through this process, we transformed the abstract prompt “Make a Cup of Tea” into a series of playful physical actions. Instead of simply pressing buttons to prepare a drink, players smash, pull, squeeze, grind, and tickle their way through the process of brewing a magical cup of tea.
Unity & XBOX Adaptive Controller
Design Process
Playtest & Feedback
Progress Bar UI: Guests eventually realized they needed to fill a progress bar, but many didn't initially understand that a bar needs to be fully completed to register progress.
Ingredient Station Interaction: Pumpkin — Hammer and button interactions were a little confusing to guests at first, but they eventually learned how to use them. Turtle — Need clearer direction and visual hints, such as adding up and down arrow indicators.
Story & Worldbuilding: Highly self-explanatory—guests quickly understood that all characters want drinks.
Bell Mechanism: Using the bell as a "NEXT" button felt counterintuitive and strange. Guests expected shaking/mixing interactions to occur before the bell rang.
Physical vs. Digital Focus: Guests spent most of their time looking directly at the physical installation and ignored the screen's progress bar. Additionally, some of he color scheme of the progress bar was misleading regarding completion.
Instructional Feedback: The system needs better mechanisms to teach guests what they did wrong when an action fails.