The ATLAS Institute is home to faculty and students whose research interests transcend traditional disciplines of engineering, design, science and art. We make tangible and digital tools and methods that shape how people interact with the world鈥攁nd we invite you explore听current and past projects developed in our labs.
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"Lab Grade" Food
3D Printed Multi-Point Capacitive Touch Sensing
3D Printing with Spent Coffee Grounds
A Desktop Biofiber Spinning Machine for Smart Textiles Design
A Fabric that Remembers
"A Fabric that Remembers"听can measure how hard it is being pressed in six different locations and includes all of the circuitry required such that you can just plug it into a controller. We also wrote a networking protocol and visualizer to computational 鈥渟ee鈥 the touch in real-time.听
AdaCAD
A computational design tool for smart textile听weaving that blends features from traditional weaving software with circuit design tools.
Alganyl: Biodegradable Plastic
AR Drum Circle
An application that听enables remote drummers to play together in a drum circle using real electronic drum pads and augmented reality technology.听
Augmented Reality Informs Human-Robot Interaction
Design听interfaces that use听augmented reality technology to superimpose data on robots to make working with them more intuitive.
Augmented Reality Maintenance and Safety (ARMAS)
Augmented Reality Remote Assistance (ARRA)
Beholder
BrailleBlocks
BrailleBlocks is a tactile gaming system that encourages visually impaired children and their sighted family members to learn Braille together. It's comprised of a set of tangible blocks and pegs,听and an associated iPad application with interactive, educational games.
Buy! Sell!
ChemBot
Building a low-cost chemical synthesis robot, with the ultimate goal of automating the most tedious and time-consuming chemistry lab operations.
Codependent Algorithms
Collaboration with Free-Flying Robots
Scalable interface technologies for supervising aerial robots, as well as new algorithms for communicating robot state to users.
Colloidal Rotaxanes: Polymer Particles with Mechanical Bonds
Cyborg Crafts: Second SKIN (Soft Keen INteraction)
Cyborg Crafts: Vibrotactile Tongue Vision
Data Narratives in Sound and Yarn
This project looks towards unconventional ways of representing data through the production of objects, namely, those produced in sound and yarn.听
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Debugging by Design
Design Memoirs
This project was started as an attempt to understand the limits of design鈥搘hat does it mean to design if it鈥檚 not about making something 鈥渂etter鈥 or 鈥渆asier.鈥 Specifically, we thought back on our experiences as mothers and tried to develop methods to investigate that experience through design.听
Designing with bioluminescence
Developing Next-Generation Rapid Prototyping Tools to Catalyze Innovation in Smart Textiles
Dynablock
Exploring听3D printing as an interactive medium with a听fast and reconstructable shape formation system.
EdBoard Technologies
听includes colorful hardware and curriculum focused on teaching students as young as 6 about electricity and electrical circuits. With fun, tiered groupings of lessons, some of which involve storytelling, children progressively expand their understanding of electrical concepts.听
Electriflow
Vegetable oil-filled thin poly sheets configured using a modified CNC machine show promise for the development of flexible pumps, valves and actuators, opening the door to new shape-changing interfaces that are low-cost, modular, soft and conformable.听
Engaging Nature in Computational Fabrication
Exploring how听intentional engagements with chance can be implemented in digital fabrication systems.
Exploring the Design of Audio-Kinetic Graphics for Education
A software framework that enables educators and other subject experts to create tactile representations that combine audio descriptions with kinetic motion.
F-formations
Exploring ways for robots to detect specific kinds of human group interactions so they can behave appropriately.
Furniture Music
Furniture music is an interactive experience that meshes furniture placement with soundscape manipulation.
Graphical User Interfaces Go Robotic
The IRON Lab explores new ways to use inexpensive consumer robotics to make computer interactions more tangible, useful and efficient.
Haptic Video Player
Video and animation are common ways of delivering concepts that cannot be easily communicated through text. This visual information is often inaccessible to blind and visually impaired persons, and alternative representations such as Braille and audio may leave out important details. Audio-haptic displays allow for the presentation of complex spatial information, along with accompanying description.
Haptic VR Wizard
Home-based DIY Interactive Information Physicalization for Young Children and their Parents
HOT SWAP
Influence of size in augmented reality telepresence avatars
Exploring how advances in augmented reality technologies are creating a new design space for long-distance telepresence communication through virtual avatars.听
It Broadens My Mind
It Broadens my Mind documents a successful program to train young adults with cognitive disabilities in computing concepts, identifies听instructional strategies听and offers听guidelines for developing tools and curricula to听support this underserved population.
Jam Station
Jam Station听utilizes various design techniques to make musical elements of a jam more accessible to novice and intermediate musicians. As collaboration between musicians improves, sensors embedded in each instrument triggers complex and colorful light displays,听helping nonmusicians improvise music together.
Jam Tabs
LiftTiles
Shape display is a promising approach to general-purpose shape-changing interfaces, but most of the existing pin-based shape displays focus on interactions at the scale of a human hand.听 LiftTiles, a modular and reconfigurable room-scale shape display, consists of an array of retractable and inflatable actuator that is compact and light, while extending up to 1.5m to allow for large-scale shape transformation.
Light Orchard
The Light Orchard is an interactive installation that invites people to walk into a grove of futuristic trees, lit with color. The trees are aware of the presence of people in their space, and can respond in many different ways. Users can play different games, watch animations, and work together听with different simulations, that allow them to easily collaborate, learn, and play together
Living Interfaces: Human Microbiome
LoopSketch
Mechamagnets
Microalgae Bioreactor
Microalgae are prolific biological powerhouses, however听their energy-dense and nutrient-rich material remains an untapped renewable resource. This project听explores the potential of microalgae in engineering as new sustainable sources for fuels, foods and materials.
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Multiscapes
Multiscapes听is a journey of human connection revealed through an interactive installation that blends dance, technology, design and sound. The project centers on a male duet, and explores uncertainty and intimacy through visually and sonically active environments.听
MyCo Domicilia
MyCo Domicilia is a suite of creative explorations as a DIY resource for fabrication with mycelium for common household and听domestic听artifacts.听
Nurturing Light
We are designing an interactive installation in an escape-room style, where the user navigates a pitch-black puzzle environment and solely depends on dinoflagellates (bioluminescent algae) for听guidance. The player is both dependent on the algae as its guide and is also the algae鈥檚 nurturer, as solving the puzzle听feeds the algae.
Object Disambiguation using Locative Prepositions
Paper Play
Personal Biochips
POPO: VR Programming Language
Printed Paper Markers
Exploring tangible interfaces made with paper and computer vision through constructing and deconstructing printed fiducial markers.
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PufferBot
An aerial robot with an expandable protective cage that deploys to encircle the drone when operating in confined spaces or near people. When flying in unobstructed airspace, the cage retracts to reduce drag and improve maneuverability. Proximity sensors can autonomously deploy the protective cage, or the operator can do so.
Ravine
RealitySketch
An augmented reality (AR) interface for sketching interactive graphics and visualizations that can be dynamically linked by moveable听objects in the visual field.
ReClaym our Compost
REFORM: Recognizing F-Formations for Social Agents
RoboGraphics: Dynamic Tactile Graphics Powered by Mobile Robots
A prototype system for presenting information to people with vision impairments that combines a touchscreen tablet, static tactile overlays and several small, mobile robots.
Robot Self-Awareness: Improving Robots' Understanding of How Humans View Robots
To improve teamwork and trust between robots and humans, researchers explore human movement and actions as expressions of attitudes towards robots, ultimately helping robots understand what people think of them.
RoomShift
RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body听just as in the real world. RoomShift has applications in virtual tours, and architectural design and interaction techniques.
SCOBY Breastplate
Self-Cleaning Textiles
Sensing Kirigami
Exploring听how shaping carbon-coated paper with manual and digital fabrication processes can create functional and aesthetic physical interfaces.
ShapeBots
Shared Autonomy for Teleoperation
Shared Reality
Slide-Ring Materials
Smart Textile Techniques
This project aims to catalyze innovation in smart textiles by creating next generation rapid prototyping tools that integrate circuit and textile design.
Smart VR Paintbrush
StoryBlocks
A听tangible block-based game that enables blind programmers to learn basic programming concepts by creating audio stories.听
String Figuring
Tech Tattoos
Textile Animation
This interactive installation features woven wool fibers laced with an intricate lattice of conductive thread and dyed with thermochromic ink. When the conductive thread is activated by movement sensors, they warm the fabric, causing portions to change color.
The Eye of the Beholder
ThreadBoard
A magnetic breadboard for embedded computing that allows for the rapid prototyping of e-textile circuits.
Tinycade
Touching Trends
Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
Unfabricate
Being mindful of the massive waste streams for digital electronics and textiles, HCI researchers address sustainability and waste in smart textiles development through designing smart textile garments with reuse in mind.
Virtual Surrogate Robot
Virtual-to-Real-World Transfer Learning
Autonomous navigation of outdoor trails remains a challenging problem. This project presents听an听approach to address this issue through virtual-to-real-world transfer learning using a variety of deep learning models trained to classify the direction of a trail in an image.听
What Design Can Learn from ASMR
Inspired by autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) media, the goal of this research is to construct a sonic toolkit for the recording and collection of sounds to support new and unconventional perceptions of one's environment.听