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Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship
Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU Boulder’s Graduate school on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.
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New summer classes empower performance community to use cutting-edge technologies
After rebounding from a major flood with vibrant new leadership and a new toolbox of performance technologies, the ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance now offers more varied and interesting opportunities to artists, engineers, creative technologists and performers than ever before. This summer, B2 offers introductory classes on how they work.
Read More about classes that teach performers how to use B2's new state-of-the-art equipment ATLAS Summer 2022 Classes about more ATLAS summer classes
ATLAS Graduation—Spring 2022
On behalf of the University of Colorado Boulder College of Engineering & Applied Science and the ATLAS Institute, family and friends of ATLAS graduating students are cordially invited to attend the ATLAS Spring 2022 commencement exercises.
Recognizing students who have successfully completed requirements for the following courses of study:
- Master of Science, Creative Technology & Design
- Bachelor of Science, Creative Technology & Design
Read More about ATLAS Institute's Spring 2022 commencement exercises
Spring 2022 ATLAS Student Awards
Graduating in May 2022 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students have been recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.
ATLAS@CHI2022
ATLAS researchers will present six published works and two workshops at the 2022 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the world’s preeminent forum for the field of human-computer interaction. The conference, commonly referred to as “CHI,” will be held hybrid-onsite April 30-May 6, 2022 in New Orleans.
ATLAS Expo: 70+ creative technology and design projects to surprise and delight
Holographic drumming partners, video projectors carried by drones, motion-activated video pinball, an app to help roommates manage household chores: These are just a few of the projects on display this Thursday during ATLAS Expo.
Black box designed by ATLAS students rises 101,000 feet, captures data and imagination
First students built the instrumentation. Then they attached it to a high-altitude weather balloon that took it to an altitude of 101,000 feet. Then, guided by ham-radio-based geolocation technology, they retrieved it from a spot 120 miles away in Eastern Colorado.
Read More about students building instrumentation and launching a balloon that rose to 101,000 feet
ATLAS PhD candidate Kailey Shara wins top award in NVC 2022
First place winner, Chembotix, came away with $45,000 for its work on speeding up the pace of chemistry research and development. Making molecules in current laboratory settings is typically time-consuming and dangerous; Kailey Shara's automation makes the process faster, safer and ultimately more productive.
ATLAS researchers' algorithm helps robots detect everyone in social gatherings
Imagine a world where robots flawlessly detect everyone in a conversation group and also greet the newcomers. Presently robots can detect group members using their sensors and detection algorithms, but these sensors and algorithms are imperfect. Hence, a robot might not detect certain people and ignore them. Described in a paper published in the March proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22), Hooman Hedayati (PhD computer science '20) and Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill and former ATLAS faculty member, proposed a method to overcome situations when conversational group (F-formation) detection algorithms fail.
Read More about ATLAS research where robots learn to recognize everyone in a room
ATLAS students take home HackCU's top awards
For the second year running, Creative Technology and Design students won first place at HackCU, the largest university hackathon in the Rocky Mountain region. Another student, whose two majors include CTD and computer science, took second place this year as the sole member of his team.
Read More about CTD students winning first place at HackCU for the second year in a row
Andrea Fautheree Márquez's project featured in Museum of Boulder's Voces Vivas
Museum of Boulder’s new exhibit, Voces Vivas: "Stories from the Latino Community in Boulder County, Past and Present," features Andrea Fautheree Márquez's thesis project, "Chicana Light," which explores the Chicano civil rights movement in Colorado. Fautheree Márquez, a Creative Industries master's student, used projection mapping to create the immersive, multimedia installation of three videos playing on their own loops.
Fiona Bell: Intimacy between designers and materials leads to sustainability
ATLAS PhD student Fiona Bell is passionate about sustainability; her doctoral dissertation tackles how to reduce waste through encouraging intimate relationships between designers, the materials they use and the artifacts they develop. In recognition of her work, Bell recently received financial support to help complete her thesis through a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Meet Ondine Geary | Dancer + Managing Director, ATLAS B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance
A Q&A with Ondine Geary by Shoutout Colorado. "I make dances that are scrappy, unruly and resourceful. They slip themselves into the crevices between genres and insist on using whatever was lost down there–chicken bones, loose wires, half-retrieved memories."
Purnendu's research at Meta brings touch to VR/AR environments
Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices–such as wristbands, rings or gloves –that could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.
Interactive software designed by Justin Gitlin part of Smithsonian Institute’s FUTURES exhibition
Centrally located in the Smithsonian Institute’s new “Futures” exhibition in Washington D.C. is an interactive light sculpture designed by acclaimed New York artist and architect Suchi Reddy, with support from a team of creative technologists that includes renowned multimedia artist and Creative Technology and Design program Lecturer Justin Gitlin.
Four ATLAS teams selected for coveted GDC showcase
Miniature cardboard arcades, ketchup and mustard bottle game controllers, physically mining for cryptocurrency and manic pizza, candy and gold stock trading over the phone: These are the concepts behind four games developed in CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute that have been selected to participate in alt.ctrl.GDC 2022, a coveted showcase of new games that feature unusual controls and surprising interactions. The event is part of GDC, the world's largest professional game developers conference, which takes place March 21-25 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation
Imagine opening up a book of nature photos only to see a kaleidoscope of graceful butterflies flutter out from the page. Such fanciful storybooks might soon be possible thanks to the work of a team of designers and engineers at CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute. SIGGRAPH sat down with one of the project's researchers, Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.”
Tinycade empowers novices to design and build arcade-like games
Limited by materials available at home during the pandemic, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers developed Tinycade—a platform for DIY game controllers that anyone, including novices, can use to design and build arcade-like games using household materials such as cardboard, mirrors and hot glue.
Arielle Dispenza recognized for excellence in teaching
Arielle Dispenza was honored in December as the recipient of the 2021 Charles A. Hutchinson Memorial Teaching Award from CU Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science. Dispenza, a teaching assistant professor who joined the College of Engineering and Applied Science faculty in 2016, is director of undergraduate programs for the ATLAS Institute, where she oversees the Creative Technology and Design program.
Read More about Arielle Dispenza winning a prestigious teaching award
ACME Lab: Creating technologies to support creativity
ATLAS recently released a new video that celebrates the ACME Lab and its commitment to designing technologies to support creatives. Directed by Professor Ellen Do, the lab researches computational tools for design, creativity, cognition, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health and wellness.
High-tech tattoos may help prevent skin cancer
Carson Bruns, assistant professor and director of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and his research team are collaborating with the CU Anschutz Medical Campus to test a tattoo ink that’s completely invisible—and could lower the risk of skin cancer, much like a “permanent sunscreen. At the same time, Bruns and doctoral student Jesse Butterfield, a researcher in Bruns' Laboratory for Emergent Nanomaterials, have launched a company called Chromopraxis that will soon sell the first commercially available, color-changing tattoo inks.
POPO lets novices program from inside their VR surroundings
Julia Uhr, an ATLAS PhD student and researcher in the ACME Lab, has created a fun 3D visual programming language that empowers novice coders to create customized VR environments while inside those environments.
HapticBots give form to virtual surfaces
In virtual reality, when users reach out to touch a visible surface, it normally isn't there. But a team of researchers in ATLAS Institute's THING Lab have been exploring ways to make the virtual tangible. Building on their past work, PhD graduate Ryo Suzuki and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger recently published a paper that was presented for ACM's Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, introducing an intriguing application of small swarm robots that dynamically move to provide physical touchpoints on demand whenever the user reaches out and touches a virtual point in space.