Fiona Bell peels a bioplastic sample off of  glass

Fiona Bell: Intimacy between designers and materials leads to sustainability

March 4, 2022

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.

Shanel Wu  bends over by a log. Wu wove the vest she is wearing on a traditional 4-shaft floor loom, integrating digital air quality sensors for outdoor workers in polluted environments.

Shanel Wu: Designing e-textiles with sustainability in mind

Feb. 9, 2022

ATLAS PhD student Shanel Wu is tackling how to reduce the waste from the rapidly expanding e-textile industry by investigating design practices that make it easier to recycle or reuse electronics and the textiles in which they are embedded.

Purnendu

Touching Virtual Reality

Feb. 9, 2022

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鈥搒uch as wristbands, rings or gloves 鈥搕hat could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.

An origami butterfly

Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation

Jan. 31, 2022

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team鈥檚 SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, 鈥淓lectriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.鈥 The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

A Tinycade console with a hand gripping a "claw" controller

Tinycade empowers novices to design and build arcade-like games

Jan. 13, 2022

Limited by materials available at home during the pandemic, ATLAS PhD student Peter Gyory and a team of ACME Lab researchers developed Tinycade鈥攁 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.

Annie Margaret being interviewed by Denver Ch. 7 at the ATLAS Institute

Denver Channel 7 discusses the impact of social media on teens' mental health with Annie Margaret

Jan. 4, 2022

"It's not enough to tell young people to put their phones down," says Annie Margaret, an ATLAS teaching assistant professor who investigates ways to counteract the negative impact of social media on the mental health of teens. In a recent interview with Denver Channel 7 News, she talked about interventions for teens she's developing for a program to be launched over the 2022 summer break.

abigale stangl

ATLAS PhD alum leading effort to improve web image descriptions for the blind

Dec. 13, 2021

ATLAS PhD alumna Abigale Stangl explores how artificial intelligence can be used to generate image descriptions when alt text鈥攖he image descriptions intended to give people who are blind or have low vision a verbal description of online image content鈥攊s missing.

Hands playing HOT SWAP, a game where the controllers are reconfigurable.

ACME Lab: Creating technologies to support creativity

Dec. 6, 2021

ATLAS recently released a new video that celebrates the ACME Lab and its commitment to designing technologies to support creativity. Directed by Professor Ellen Do, the lab researches computational tools for design, creativity, cognition, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health and wellness.

Two arms showing a CU tattoo on one arm and numbers on another, illuminated by UV light.

High-tech tattoos may help prevent skin cancer

Nov. 15, 2021

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鈥檚 completely invisible鈥攁nd could lower the risk of skin cancer, much like a 鈥減ermanent sunscreen."

Animated view of a castle with trees around it, as well as showing where variables are chosen in the VR world of Popo.

POPO lets novices program from inside their VR surroundings

Nov. 9, 2021

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.

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