WILD & TAME is a combination of a spherical robot with personality and a buttonless, formable controller. We observed that when users interact with technology, they have a tendency to attribute human features to non-human artifacts. People talk about how their computer had a bad day or how evil their printer is.

With WILD & TAME we tried to play with this attribution and design this interaction. The player has to explore the personality and mood of the spherical robot. He or she uses the controller to either calm or thrill the robot.

The inner life of the robot is expressed through surface animations on the robot, its behavior and its heart-rate (which can be sensed through vibrations in the controller).

This was part of the Bachelor's project SpiDEx at the University of Bremen. Our goal was to research the possibilities of tangibles in a gaming context. In collaboration with Julian Hespenheide, Felix Heibeck, Michele Krüger and Wiebke Roetman.