Quinn Liu on Tactile Art, Teamwork, and a Giant Cat Butt

About the maker:

Qingyun “Quinn” Liu is a mixed media artist, an indie game developer and the Founder/Creative Director of DaChu Interactive. 

Her practice focuses on embodied interaction and alternative controllers in games and interactive media, creating tactile experiences rich in emotions. She has presented work at The Grand LA, GDC Alt.Ctrl, IGN Live, and CatCon, leading teams across creative direction and technical pipelines, and has received recognition from organizations such as the Themed Entertainment Association.

Her recent projects include InSync, a multisensory maze that leads participants to a mystical creature encounter while blindfolded, and How to Pet Your Cat, a fun and absurd social cat butt controller game celebrated by thousands of in-person players, and covered by major media outlets including IGN and CNET.

Tell us about yourself

I’m Qingyun “Quinn” Liu, an interactive experience designer and the founder of the studio behind How to Pet Your Cat, the viral alt control game featuring a giant cat butt.

My passion is in bridging physical and digital experiences to design intuitive interactions that bring people together through play. With a background in film and the arts, and experience across indie games and themed entertainment, my work combines interaction, storytelling, and physical experience. A lot of it comes from experimentation and building things by hand, which naturally led me into maker communities that value learning by doing.

Where are you based? 

I’m currently based in Los Angeles, California. I work within the creative technology community around USC, where many of my collaborators and production resources are located.

Are you a member of any local makerspaces?

I’m a member of The Octavia Lab at the Los Angeles Central Library, a free public makerspace with accessible tools such as fast 3D printing and modeling. It’s been especially helpful for experimenting with ideas and getting hands-on experience with fabrication. Besides that, most of my work happens in my own studio, where my team and I prototype interactive systems, build physical structures, develop custom sensors, and experiment with animatronics. 

What is your day job?

I run my own creative practice as the creative director of DaChu Interactive. My role is to define the creative direction and interaction strategy of each project, then carry it through production. Day to day, that means moving between concept development, interaction design, prototyping, playtesting, and working with collaborators to bring projects to public presentation.

How did DaChu Interactive get started?

DaChu Interactive grew out of the production reality of my MFA thesis, InSync, at USC. I originally envisioned an experience where people form trust with a mythical being through touch, sound, and shared presence in the dark. As the project grew, it became clear that building a living, responsive creature would require many areas of expertise.

I started pulling together engineers, artists, and designers I met through USC network, and built a process around fast iteration and playtest driven tuning. As we continued working together across multiple projects, How to Pet Your Cat began gaining wider attention, and that momentum showed the approach held up with the right collaborators. At that point, it was no longer about a single project, but a shared way of working, which led me to formalize DaChu Interactive.

Tell me about InSync. What was the inspiration?

InSync started with a simple question: What does it mean to build empathy with something you can’t see?  

I designed the experience to start with blindfolded guests moving through a maze. As they make their way forward, their attention slowly shifts toward sound, texture, and bodily awareness. That journey leads to an encounter with a mythical creature that communicates entirely through nonverbal behavior.

The creature, Omu, reacts in real time to the participant’s movements. It tracks how close you are, where you touch, and how much pressure you apply. Behind the scenes, a central system and state-based logic allow Omu to recognize different kinds of interaction and respond by tilting its head, nodding, or leaning into your hand. Its voice shifts in tone and texture to express emotion, alongside cues like a heartbeat and breathing rhythm that help guide how people interact with it.

Participants learn by paying attention to all the cues their body receives and proceeding with care. They may sense what pleases or unsettles Omu, calms its heart according to the signals,  or shares an enveloping embrace, marking a moment of acceptance and connection. 

What skills did you learn along the way?

Building all of this pushed me far outside my comfort zone. There was no existing blueprint for building this system, so I learned mostly by making. Oftentimes, my team and I started from tested approaches, like tutorials on Instructables or Adafruit forums, then iterated our prototypes towards the intended experience. I was building custom pressure sensors, soldering circuits to support the state-based system, tuning animatronic motion, and running playtests to see how people actually responded. A lot of the learning happened mid-build, through small adjustments and watching how physical interactions shifted participants’ behavior and perception.

When I got stuck, I often turned to my skilled teammates for informal braintrust conversations, where ideas clicked and problems got solved. I was also very lucky to learn from mentors like Joe Garlington, a former Imagineer, who helped me understand how to shape natural animatronic movements while focusing on audience experience. That experimental and iterative hands-on process helped me grow so much as an interaction designer.

How did that lead to How To Pet Your Cat?

InSync was an emotionally heavy project about trust and understanding. It came with mixed responsibilities: building animatronics, designing responsive skin systems, programming reactive audio, and constructing a full maze and narrative environment. The process was complex and time-consuming, and in the middle of it, I felt the team needed a release.

We decided to take a short detour and design a three-week, game-jam-style experiment that was intentionally playful and a little ridiculous, while still carrying the same tactile DNA as InSync. The goal was to see whether a physical, slightly ridiculous setup could get people laughing and connecting almost right away.

Using the same custom pressure sensor technology and our shared love for cats, we created How To Pet Your Cat. What started as a playful project went on to travel to GDC Alt.Ctrl, Day of the Devs, IGN Live, CatCon, and Seameow, reaching thousands of players along the way.

What has been your favorite reaction so far?

I’ll always remember how kids reacted to How To Pet Your Cat during conventions. Many kept asking their parents to bring them back and play the game again and again. Some thought the cat butt was an actual living cat and wanted to comb its fur after play. One even volunteered to stay at our booth to help us run the game!

Adults seemed to take the competition more seriously, sabotaging each other mid-match, trying to get a higher score. People would come in as total strangers, pair up, and leave smiling, sometimes with a hug or a handshake. My personal favorite moment, though, was when an actual orange cat sniffed the cat butt controller and got visibly confused. That was priceless. 

Are there any other projects you’d like to share?

I’m currently leading DaChu to develop a smaller, take-home version of the cat butt controller. The goal is to translate the physical humor and tactile expressiveness of the original installation into a soft, responsive companion that people can live with. It functions both as a playful controller for simple games and as a social companion that reacts to touch and presence.

My latest focus on the project is on prototyping interaction behaviors, animation, and feedback pacing, exploring how a living toy can feel expressive without becoming overwhelming. This direction allows me to continue working at the intersection of embodied interaction, emotional design, and accessible physical computing.

What’s your advice for readers?

Always go with the ideas you love.

Don’t think too much about how they’d come true. Start doing it, and you will figure it out.

Where can people find more?

We’re on our way to more exhibitions. You can also visit us on dachuinteractive.com and follow us on Instagram @DaChuInteractive and see where we are going next!