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Recent News
ATLAS Distinguished Speaker: Forest Young
How can designers and creative technologists effectively bridge technical and cultural divides in the world? Join the ATLAS community as we welcome Forest Young, global chief creative director of Wolff Olin, to discover answers to this question. Young will also discuss creative opportunities and social impact with user experience, typography, branding and interactive design.
Q&A: Student organizers designed inclusive hackathon for those who feel excluded
ATLAS students will host the sixth annual T9Hacks the weekend of March 19-21, promoting interest in creative technologies, coding, design and making, among college women and others who may have felt marginalized during hackathons or other technical activities.
Black, queer and an engineer: Meet LeeLee James, BTU Lab student assistant
LeeLee James, BTU's student assistant, is also the "Twirling Tech Goddess" on YouTube. Her show encourages radical diversity and inclusion by making learning tech more fun, accessible and relatable to people underrepresented in STEM.
Wayne Seltzer, MIT alumnus and ATLAS technologist-in-residence, shares his passion for making
Wayne Seltzer, ATLAS Institute's technologist-in-residence, was featured as one of four MIT alumni who are ‘making’ their mark with a love for building and tinkering. As a maker mentor, Seltzer has worked with many students and the BTU community. One of his most recent projects include a repurposed 1970s jukebox that plays digital recordings of performances by CU Boulder music students.
Whaaat!? Festival offers video gamers a walk in the woods
When Tracy Fullerton began working on her award-winning video game, "Walden, a game," she was aiming to create a different kind of video game experience—one that's more akin to an excursion into nature than the adrenaline-pumping action that drives most video games. Her inspiration for the game comes from the book, "Walden," by Henry David Thoreau, which speaks to the benefits of a simplified existence close to nature. During her online talk, part of the ATLAS Institute's yearlong Whaaat!? Festival, Fullerton, will guide us on a journey into the forests of game design, encouraging us to chase inspiration and find meaning in the underbrush, rather than sticking to the trails of conventional game genres and solutions.
Kailey Shara's research featured by CU Boulder's New Venture Challenge
ATLAS PhD student Kailey Shara, CEO of Chembotix, is competing in New Venture Challenge 14 with the company's robotic automation platform that dramatically speeds up chemistry research and development.
AR Drum Circle research envisions enjoyable remote jamming experiences despite latency
Long before the pandemic sent people scrambling into isolation, musicians have longed to jam virtually with others across the globe. But online jamming isn’t feasible because of latency, the tiny delay that occurs when data travels from one point to the next. ATLAS researchers and Ericsson Research project collaborators are exploring ways in which remote drumming experiences can be made more enjoyable despite the latency, including drumming with avatars.
Seeding change: MS students' paper on cycles of poverty in rural India accepted by international conference
When three first-year ATLAS students in the Social Impact track of the Creative Technology and Design master’s program learned of the staggering suicide rate of male farmers in rural India and the suffering that ensues for their surviving family members, they wanted to explore effective interventions.
COVID-19 creates new learning opportunities for ATLAS students
The pandemic has created immense challenges for students and instructors. At the same time, the switch to all-online teaching also created some unforeseen opportunities. This fall, the faculty roster for ATLAS included New York City-based creative technologist, David Tracy; extended reality developer David Lobser, also based in New York City; Josh Knowles, a software engineer and interactive artist living in Austin, Texas; and Jeff Branson, who works on an independent project for NASA and teaches from his Middlebury, Vermont home.
Featured Capstone Projects December 2020
To finish out their studies at ATLAS, all BS CTD students complete a culminating capstone project that draws on the diverse skills and techniques learned throughout their time in the program.
Researchers scale up tiny actuator inspired by muscle
ATLAS Assistant Professor Carson Bruns and Professor Franck Vernerey received $477,000 from the National Science Foundation to begin research on a new kind of biocompatible actuator that contracts and relaxes in only one dimension, like muscles.
Q&A with new B2 director Steven Frost
B2 Reimagined: New B2 director Steven Frost shares the opportunities and difficulties of opening ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance during the pandemic and his vision for B2’s future.
Pufferfish-inspired robot could improve drone safety
Pufferbot is an aerial robot with an expandable protective structure that deploys to encircle the drone and prevent the drone's rotors from coming in contact with obstacles or people.
