what if haptics can make you "feel" escape room experiences?
If you are a service designer for Escape Rooms or a sketching enthusiastic designers, this is for you!
Have you ever imagined how emerging technology can disrupt our current experiences in escape rooms? The main goal through haptics is: enhancing/ enriching emotional dimensions through Haptics using elements that already exist in the context of escape rooms. This blog is just going to present some ideas I sketched to see how haptics can change the game of escape rooms. Feel free to expand these ideas for other contexts and send me here.
Haptic Paper and haptic printer
Introducing Haptic Paper, that can register and save user emotions of winning or losing along with the photo booth photograph the team clicks at the end of every escape room exit.
Improving that idea, the Haptic paper allows the user to have haptic sensations of memories of the escape room. The user can choose one memorable haptic or touch interaction that they would like to carry forward with them. For example, in horror themes they can save the haptic feel of squishing something and interact with the paper to remember that feeling.
This can also help them share their memories with their friends when they narrate their escape room stories and make them feel the same.
Haptic Patch
Have you ever grabbed someone’s arm when in tension or to create a sense of urgency?
Replicated human reflexes of grabbing or holding something tight during emergency or pressure through a hand/shoulder patch or heavy vibrations through a pager-like token clipped to a belt to give a sense of remaining time to the user.
This will be supported through a visual feedback of the actual amount of time remaining to solve the puzzle.
Haptic Blocks
The major part of the escape rooms is solving the clues that are embedded in the environment and breaking through the puzzles. How can we be creative of building the clues using haptics and make interacting with physical objects less boring?
Introduced new ways of giving clues through these haptic blocks. These are one of the clues for the players in the process of solving the whole puzzle. The player has to match the appropriate blocks that have the same kind of haptic sensations. Once the blocks are created by matching this way, they roll them like dice. With direction actuators, the block that has to guide the player to the next clue will give a haptic feedback (ex. Vibrate, jump).
other ideas …
vr + haptics
Combined ways in which haptics can be introduced into VR escape rooms through controller gestures/ feedback or headgear touch points to guide the player through directions in the space.
Haptic Numbers
Introduced new ways to give number clues to the players. Instead of searching for numbers through other elements in the room, the player will touch the blocks to sense the vibrations to count and know the number. These numbers will help solve a puzzle to unlock the number locks.
selection board
Expanded the ways of selecting an escape room theme through this selection board by introducing a palette of haptic vibrations to provide menu of the escape room themes.
