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SIGGRAPH sat down with 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.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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."

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.

CTD senior EO Rafelson has fabricated a high-tech kaleidoscope for his capstone project as well as developed a way to project the patterns generated onto a planetarium dome. His project, “Kaleideo,” will be presented at Fiske Planetarium on Tuesday, Nov. 9 for two free shows.

In virtual reality, when you reach out and try to touch a visible surface, it normally isn't there. Using a swarm of Rubik's Cube-sized, shape-changing robots, the illusion becomes physical.

Sasha de Koninck, a member of ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design Lab, presented her future heirloom project, The Research Lab of Ambiguous Futurology, at the "Making and Doing" exhibition at the 4S hybrid conference, held Oct. 6-9, both in Toronto and virtually.