Type
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.
Creative Prompt
We divided the prompt “Make a Cup of Tea” into two key parts: “Tea” and “Make.”
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.
Interest Curve
Tech
Player Test
Reflection