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Inspiration
We were inspired by the demo video presented by the STYLY team during the pre-hack workshop. They mentioned during the workshop that they were interested in seeing experiences that fit inside a traditional Japanese house's tea room, so we thought it would be fun to explore possibilities for teaching people outside of Japan about Japanese culture and giving them a taste of Japan by leveraging XR and STYLY.
What it does
Our experience provides a step-by-step guide for completing a temae (点前) tea ceremony in XR, with a virtual tea setup and virtual utensils presented within the user's immediate space. Guidance is provided by Seto Taisho, a yokai with wit and sass. Seto provides immediate feedback to users during the experience.
How we built it
We built the experience using Unity, STYLY’s Unity Plugin, and STYLY-NetSync for multiplayer synchronization. STYLY’s plugin was used to accelerate MR/XR deployment, specifically through the STYLY-XR-Rig for platform-agnostic XR setup. STYLY-NetSync RPCs and shared global variables were used to coordinate tea ceremony steps, trigger feedback from Seto Taisho, and synchronize utensil interactions across multiple users in the same mixed reality space. Meta Quest hand tracking enabled gesture-driven interactions, allowing users to learn proper tea ceremony form through movement. The Meta Building Block was used for spatial audio, providing distant bird chirping and ambient, tranquil Japanese music to enhance immersion. In addition, STYLY attributes and actions (components) were explored and partially implemented during development.
Challenges we ran into
Scope was definitely a challenge, as we originally wanted to walkthrough the entire tea ceremony, but Japanese tea ceremonies are very detailed and involved, and including hands-on instructions for a beginning-to-end tea ceremony was beyond the scope of Reality Hack, especially after it was cut short; our lead developer had only 2 hours of sleep over the weekend while she studied the STYLY documentation. We also wanted to include more interactions, initially, but we realized that our time would be better served polishing a select number of key interactions in order to have a strong vertical slice, rather than overexerting ourselves and ending up with an uneven experience.
We also wanted to be as authentic as possible in representing a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, so we spent a lot of time researching tea ceremonies. In our conversations with subject matter experts, however, we found that there are common variations in tea ceremonies, and we were advised to not get caught up in granular details and focus on capturing the spirit of the tea ceremony experience, since the demo is for illustrative purposes--the point is to convey how XR can be effective in teaching about cultural traditions and engendering empathy for different cultures.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of the most challenging yet successful aspects of our implementation was enabling the tea ceremony to spawn wherever guests chose, reinforcing our vision of a location-based multiplayer experience. We encountered multiple compatibility issues between Meta and STYLY, which required extensive experimentation to determine which building blocks functioned reliably together. Through this process, we identified workable solutions and refined our setup. Additionally, we addressed user disorientation by spawning the ceremony room beneath the player’s hands using semi-transparent tatami mats. This visual guidance helped users orient themselves in the space and naturally transition into a kneeling posture, aligning the experience more closely with the traditional practices of a Japanese tea ceremony.
Furthermore, we are proud of how much character we were able to bring to Seto Taisho--he has an array of unique animations and vibrant facial expressions, and he has some sassy and witty dialogue to boot.
We are also proud of the unique gesture-based interactions that we were able to create in XR, particularly because we feel that they help guests learn the proper form for tea ceremonies through kinesthetic learning, controller-free!
Ultimately, after narrowing our focus, we did get a decent minimum viable product that shows our proof of concept.
What we learned
We learned that XR has so much potential in preserving and spreading cultural traditions, and that the technology can be a tremendous force for good in engendering empathy and understanding for people across cultures.
We also learned that a short, focused experience that is well-polished and representative of our creative vision is significantly better than a "complete" experience that is buggy and broken. We scoped down early on, thinking we had scoped down enough to complete everything, but we had to scope down again about halfway through the hackathon when we realized that we still had a lot of work cut out for us, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't spread ourselves too thin. In the end, it was a reminder for future hackathons to concentrate on iterative development and to start small.
What's next for Chado XR
Our team hopes to continue developing the experience and to hopefully publish it in a completed form. We also hope to have the opportunity to collaborate with the STYLY team in the future!
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