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.”
We transformed the simple act of making tea into a playful Halloween witchcraft experience. Using 12 adaptive inputs, we built seven 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.