News

Whaaat!? Festival Brings Experimental Gaming Goodness to ATLAS

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:05:21 +0000

Whaaat!? Festival Brings Experimental Gaming Goodness to ATLAS Michael Kwolek Wed, 10/15/2025 - 14:05

Michael Kwolek

Attending Whaaat!? Festival

Saturday, October 25, 2025
9am - 5pm

Roser ATLAS Center
1125 18th St., Boulder, CO

All ages (ideal for 16+)

Regular entry: $16; VIP & pay-what-you-can option available!

Info + Tickets

Experimental video games, arcade classics, mini golf, student-designed creations, a riff on Taskmaster and more—Sounds like Whaaat!? Festival time again.

Coming Saturday, October 25th, 2025 (9am - 5pm), in the Roser ATLAS Center, Whaaat!? Festival is a celebration of weird games and experimental play for anyone interested in exploring the frontiers of digital and physical game design. Plus, all-you-can-eat breakfast cereal!

We spoke with festival organizer and associate teaching professor, Danny Rankin, about what to expect from this year’s fest.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is the Whaaat!? Festival all about?

It's a weird cereal-fueled arcade fest with different speakers, events, workshops, games, alternative controllers and experimental interactive art.

We started it eight years ago because we felt there's so much more in the world of games and play beyond conventional industry ideas.

Hang out for a day and play—that's the thing.

Give us a little bit of your background and why this is important to you.

I've worked in graphic design and fabrication and art design for a long time, and I came to grad school here.

I got really into games because I thought it was fun to see people at play. So I started making alternative control games that we showed at festivals around the world, as well as board games.

I've played video games my whole life, but I didn't realize just how cool and weird and exploratory and artistic they can get. So for me, I have always wanted to see more unusual forms of play.

I teach classes at ATLAS on game design and on alternative interfaces and weird controllers. That's a big part of what I do as director of the Whaaat!? Lab, which is a creative studio space for designing interesting experimental games and interactions.

What is the theme for this year’s festival?

This year the theme is Summer Camp, even though it's October. We're theming all of the arcades around weird cabin vibes and nature games. There's also a gambling cabin [note: not real gambling!] and a creature cabin.

The Media Archeology Lab will bring a bunch of old game consoles and hardware that people can play.

We're building miniature golf holes, running games of foursquare and playing with a giant rainbow parachute. And we'll also run a game that we're calling “Scoutmaster” as a live conversation about that work, while also torturing people through various menial tasks. It's like the game show Taskmaster, except at scout camp.

We just decided to go a little wild this year. More embodied activities, less sitting and listening to somebody talk.

Sounds like the festival will take over the Roser ATLAS Center.

We'll use a lot of the building for exploration, but we'll be running games outside, weather dependent. We might be running some stuff out there in the elevator and the roof—all over the building and in the Black Box Experimental Studio.

Who should come to Whaaat!? Festival?

Anybody who likes to have fun and play. You don't even have to be a lover of video games, although we'll have a lot of really cool video games on display. But we also just think about play as a really big, exciting thing. You can get a lot of people to do fun experiments with that.

And if you like merit badges, we're going to have a bunch you can earn this year. If you like gamifying your life into a series of bizarre achievements, like whether you got attacked by a person in a bear suit at a festival, there's a merit badge for that.

So it’s much more than video games.

Yeah, I think that we can think about video games as this one-sided forum where you are meant to be entertained or immersed. I love that about games, but we're also interested in video games that are humorous or provocative or really experimental and strange. Games that explore play as an interactive art form, things that you wouldn't even conventionally call a game—maybe it's a digital experiment.

A lot of game industry people have come to the festival over the years. I try to expand their imagination of what's possible because we spend most of our time not playing any kind of big studio, conventional, successful games. People play those at home and don't need to come to a festival to do that.

We curate a selection we hope will blow people's minds around what video games can do.

Are there special guests?

We're inviting some artists from out of town. One of my longtime collaborators and co-founder of the Whaaat!? Festival, Matt Bethancourt, is coming in.

Artists from around CU and grad students from the Creative Technology & Design program are all working on this thing we're calling It Came From Camp Whaaat!? It’s a one-week game jam where we're creating a bunch of in-place experiments in the building, including miniature golf holes and experimental controllers for games that are going to be showcased.

Why is ATLAS the right venue for the festival?

ATLAS is really interested in the fusion between digital and physical environments. So anywhere you're creating things with computers, but are also interested in how people physically show up and experience those things, that's a big part of our DNA.

ATLAS is all about radical creativity and invention. And I think that applies to games.

Cereal-fueled celebration draws gamers of all ages to explore the frontiers of game design.

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Minority Report-inspired interface allows us to explore time in new ways

Michael Kwolek — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:48:13 +0000

Minority Report-inspired interface allows us to explore time in new ways Michael Kwolek Fri, 09/26/2025 - 08:48

Michael Kwolek

Imagine a scene—a bird feeder on a summer afternoon, the dark of night descending over the Flatirons, a fall day on a university campus. Now imagine moving backwards and forwards through time on a single aspect of that setting while everything else remains. One ATLAS engineer is building technology that lets us experience multiple time scales all at once.

The Proteus Team

David Hunter developed Proteus with expertise from ACME Lab members Suibi Weng, Rishi Vanukuru, Annika Mahajan, Ada Zhao and Leo Ma, and advising from professor and lab director Ellen Do.

Brad Gallagher and Chris Petillo in the B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance provided critical technical support to make the project come alive in the B2 Black Box Studio.

“Proteus: Spatiotemporal Manipulations” by David Hunter, ATLAS PhD student, in collaboration with his ACME Lab colleagues, allows people to simultaneously observe different moments in time through a full-scale interactive experience combining video projection, motion capture, audio and cooperative elements.

The project was shown through the creative residency program in the B2 Center for Media, Art and Performance at the Roser ATLAS Center. Housed in the B2 Black Box Studio, the project team used 270-degree video projections, a spatial audio array and motion capture technology, creating an often larger-than-life way to explore many different time scales at once. Simultaneous projections highlighted the lifecycle of a bacteria in a petri dish, a day in the life of a street corner on campus, and weather patterns at a global scale among other vignettes.

This tangible manipulation of time within a space can feel disorienting at first. It takes a while to adjust to what is happening, a unique sensation that has an expansive, almost psychedelic quality. But it may also have practical applications.

We spoke to Hunter about the inspiration behind Proteus, possible use cases and what comes next.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Several people can explore different moments in time simultaneously.

Tell us about the inspiration for Proteus.

There are scenes and settings where you want to see a place or situation at two distinct time frames, and for that comparison to not necessarily be hard-edged or side by side. You want it to be interpolated through time, so you can see patterns of change in space over that time.

Describe the early iterations of this project.

It was originally a tabletop setup with projection over small robots, and you could manipulate the robots to produce similar kinds of effects. There was a version running with a camera giving you a live video feed, but we switched it to curated videos as it was easier to understand what was happening with time manipulation. You're potentially making quite a confusing image for yourself, so the robots gave you something tangible to hold on to.

How did it evolve into the large-scale installation it is now?

We thought it would be interesting to see this at a really large scale in the B2, and the creative residencies made that possible. That's when we moved away from robots and it was like, “Well, how would you control it in this sort of space?”

I took a projection mapping course last semester and worked on a large-scale projection, but then we changed it to hand interaction—gesture-based in the air, kind of like “Minority Report.”

As you closer or farther from the screen, you change the time scale of part of the scene.

How do you describe what takes place when people interact with Proteus?

The key is interaction—people can actually control the time lapse. Usually, time lapses are linear, not two dimensional, and we don't have control over them. Here, you can focus on what interests you across different time periods, or hold two points in time side by side to see patterns and relationships as they change across space and time. This also enables multiple visitors to find the things they are interested in; there isn't one controller of the scene, it is collaborative.

What are some of the use cases you’ve thought about for this technology?

Anything with a geospatial component—a complex scene where many things are happening at once. You might want to keep track of something happening in the past while still tracking something else happening at another time.

You can use these portals to freeze multiple bits of action or set them up to visualize where things have gone at different points in time and space.

It's always been about collaboration—situation awareness where lots of people are trying to interrogate one image and see what everyone else is doing at the same time.

Then there’s film analysis: Can we put in a whole movie and perhaps you can find interesting relationships and compositions around that? This could be a fun way to spatially explore a narrative, too.

We're also looking at how it could be used for mockup design. Let's say you're prototyping an app and you have 50 different variations. You could collapse those all into one space, interrogate them through “time,” then mix and match different portions of your designs to come up with new combinations. It also works with volumetric images like body scans, where we swap time for depth.

What are the creative influences that drove the visual style of the piece?

I've long been interested in time lapses, like skateboard photography where multiple snapshots are overlaid on the same space as a single image.

There's all this work by Muybridge and Marey, who invented chronophotography. That's how they worked out that horses leave the ground while they run.

David Hockney did a ton of Polaroid work. There's a famous one of people playing Scrabble, shot from his perspective. All these different Polaroids are stuck down next to each other, not as a true representation of space but as a way of capturing time within that space—breaking the unity of the image.

Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli kicked off this research sprint and prompted me to look back at my interest in time and photography.

Several time lapse videos are projected simultaneously on the Black Box Studio's 270-degree screen.

Proteus is controlled with an app on a mobile phone modified to work with motion capture.

It does force your brain to work in a way that it is not used to, which is a really cool thing to happen in a creative sense but also in a technical sense.

We aren't used to seeing anything with non-uniform time. Whenever we're watching a video, we want to find a point in the video, then we see the whole image rewind or fast forward. Of course that makes sense in a lot of situations, but there could be interesting use-cases for interactive non-uniform time.

What makes ATLAS an ideal place for this type of research?

There's all the people, whether it's research faculty who are interested in asking questions like, “How can we make a novel system or improve research that's going on in this area?” Or it's super strong technical expertise, which is like, “Let's have a go at making this work in a projection environment.”

What’s next for the Proteus project?

At the moment, I can only compare by changing the time on a region of space and I can compare a region of space against another region at different times. But it might be interesting to be able to break the image and say, “Actually, I want to clone this region and see it from a different time period.” Can I reconstitute the image in some way?

Experience Proteus during Research & Innovation Week

Proteus will be running in the B2 Black Box Studio as part of:

ATLAS Research Open Labs
Roser ATLAS Center
October 10, 2025
3-5pm
FREE, no registration needed

ATLAS PhD student David Hunter researches novel ways to interact with different moments in time across a single video stream.

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How to avoid seeing disturbing content on social media and protect your peace of mind

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:10:25 +0000

How to avoid seeing disturbing content on social media and protect your peace of mind Michael Kwolek Mon, 09/15/2025 - 09:10

Annie Margaret

Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement, not protect your peace of mind. Learn straightforward ways to reduce your chances of seeing disturbing content.

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New research explores tinkering as a key classroom learning method

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:21:34 +0000

New research explores tinkering as a key classroom learning method Michael Kwolek Wed, 07/16/2025 - 10:21

Michael Kwolek

When kids tinker in the classroom, they get to build many useful skills from computing to collaboration to creativity and more.

Krithik Ranjan, PhD student and member of the ACME Lab, studies low-cost forms of human-computer interaction that enable more people to explore their creativity through technology. And tinkering plays a big part in that.

Ranjan presented his work at Constructionism 2025 conference in Zurich, Switzerland, which explores how constructionist ideas can inspire advancements in learning technologies and methodologies. He filled us in on what he presented.

Tell us about your research focus.

I've been trying to build ways for people to create with technology in a more open-ended, tinkering-friendly way. Tinkering is a way to learn where you can explore, you can experiment, you can playfully interact with things to learn a concept, whether it is computer science, physics, astronomy or anything like that.

Can you describe the intention behind your paper on “The Design Space of Tangible Interfaces for Computational Tinkerability”?

There are two elements to it. One is the tangible side where the idea is that you're interacting with computational elements in the physical space, either stuff like paper or robots or different components that you can put together. And the other aspect is computational tinkerability, that playful open-ended aspect about creating something computationally.

I want to understand how people have previously developed design spaces, which is this concept of a framework to understand what people have done, what it means, and how we can analyze and categorize different types of projects in that space. I reviewed 33 different projects to figure out: What are kids tinkering with? What are children making? And how are they making it?

This project was from the perspective of a designer to inform future designers who are going to create such interfaces and projects.

What did you discover in conducting this research?

We figured out there is a range of how tinkerable or how expressive an interface can be, so we try to categorize that based on a “spectrum of tinkerability.”

The other important takeaway is the idea of expanding beyond code. There's so much work, both commercially and in research, around enabling students to code. But a lot of researchers also found that this line-by-line type of programming is also a bit discouraging to students from underrepresented groups. So there's a lot of work in expanding the ways you can create with computers to not just rewrite lines of code to program or make a game or make a 3D model. But more diverse ways that suit different interests.

Who might be the audience for this research and what might they do with it?

The goal was to categorize this space so people can refer to it and design based on that. The audience is other researchers and designers of interfaces for learning with computers. Based on the implications, they can better design ways that students learn by making [tools] more expressive, more open-ended, learner-driven, and catering to different interests instead of just code or just one type of way to interact.

A lot of your work is focused on using simple materials that are more accessible to students all over the world. How might this research help educators expand the tools they have access to for students?

In practical situations like classrooms and formal learning centers, there are always constraints with resources, with the number of people, with the kind of things you can get access to. And quite often we might find that projects, interfaces and tools in the market are usually one-off and they are a couple hundred dollars or more. So I was trying to look at these projects in terms of the kind of materials they use and how they enable people to interact with the material.

There are some projects like [ATLAS PhD] Ruhan Yang's Paper Robots and a couple other projects that we looked at where the focus was DIY-based interfaces that educators can fabricate themselves for their classrooms. These projects stressed on publishing the plans and instructables and stuff like that online so that anybody can use them to build these interactive interfaces themselves.

And part of this was also using platforms that are already available. Arduino, Microbit and Raspberry Pi are commonly used electronic platforms in education for many different purposes. There's a way to make these interfaces more accessible if you use those existing platforms instead of making custom electronics.

How does a student who uses your Cartoonimator tool, for example, learn in the process of figuring out how to use and then make animations?

This idea of tinkering and learning by making is based on these learning philosophies of constructionism. The idea is that you're learning by building artifacts, building mental models yourself instead of being instructed by somebody else.

A big part is the idea of being stuck and then trying to work through the problem, trying to figure out what's wrong, what needs to change and get something working. This way of learning is focused on the learner's motivation.

What's next for this research?

Cartoonimator is one example where I looked at these principles about expanding beyond code and working with more accessible materials to build an interface that's open ended and tinkering-friendly for learning something like animation.

I'm looking further at how we can engage students with physical computing using paper, because that is more accessible, easier to expand on and gives you this space of creative exploration that you may not usually have with devices.

If you're new with technology, you might be afraid of breaking something apart, but that's really a core part of tinkering, so I'm looking at how paper-based interfaces can foster the idea.

PhD student Krithik Ranjan analyzed 33 student learning tools and developed a “spectrum of tinkerability” that offers designers new ways to think about teaching computational skills.

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ATLAS community presents new research on interactive systems at DIS 2025

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 17:14:27 +0000

ATLAS community presents new research on interactive systems at DIS 2025 Michael Kwolek Thu, 06/26/2025 - 11:14

The 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) in Madeira, Portugal, features work from ten ATLAS community members representing three labs. This year’s event has five focus areas: Critical Computing and Design Theory, Design Methods and Processes, Artifacts and Systems, Research Through Design, and AI and Design with an overall theme around “design that transcends human-centered perspectives.”

ATLAS researchers study a broad range of topics, from human-computer interaction to biomaterials to woven forms.

Ellen Do, professor and ACME director, explains what connects the work our community is presenting at the conference: “I think all of the papers and presentations we have are on designing interactive systems. Some of the systems could be physical, some could be digital, some could be human-and-people, human-and-physical objects. So I think the theme about interactive systems and how you make systems interactive, what kind of user experience or human experience or immersive experience with the object or system or even the ecosystem, or the human communication system—I think that's all there.”

ATLAS research at DIS 2025

"Chaotic, Exciting, Impactful": Stories of Material-led Designers in Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Gabrielle Benabdallah, Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez (ATLAS PhD student), Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab director, associate professor), Mirela Alistar (ATLAS Living Matter Lab director, assistant professor)

This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration between designers, scientists, and engineers through ten stories as told from the perspective of material-led designers. These stories focus on material-led designers working in contexts like biodesign and smart textiles, where novel materials, fabrication methods, and technology often intersect, requiring cross-disciplinary collaboration. By including perspectives from designers within and adjacent to HCI, the study broadens the understanding of interdisciplinary teamwork that combines scientific, technical, and craft-based expertise. Our analysis highlights how designers navigate challenges like differing terminologies, epistemic hierarchies, and conflicting priorities. We discuss strategies such as material prototypes, attitudes of inquiry and openness, switching lexicons, and the value of interdisciplinary contexts. This research underscores designers as “translators” who mediate epistemological tensions, use tangible artifacts to communicate, and articulate possible applications. This research contributes ten stories as narrative resources for understanding strategies and fostering interdisciplinary spaces within HCI.

Towards Yarnier Interactive Textiles: Mapping a Design Journey through Hand Spun Conductive Yarns
Etta W. Sandry (ATLAS PhD student), Lily M. Gabriel (ATLAS undergraduate student), Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez (ATLAS PhD student), Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab Director, associate professor)

The ability to create a wide and varied set of interactive textiles depends on the materials that one has available. Currently, the range of yarns that can be used to bring interactivity to textiles is greatly limited, especially considering the diversity available in non-conductive yarns. This pictorial traces a design journey into hand spinning that seeks to address this limitation and contributes samples of techniques and materials that could be used to create conductive yarns along with reflection on design methods that enabled us to explore a wider range of aesthetic expressions. We advocate for an approach that reconnects with the textiles in e-textiles, embraces divergence, and prioritizes the material as the driver of a design concept. We offer pathways for readers and researchers to continue this exploration within varied domains and practices.

Connect! A Circuit-Driven Card Game
Ruhan Yang (ATLAS PhD alum), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab director, professor)

Hybrid physical-digital games often rely on screen-based interactions, which can detract from their tactile nature. We introduce Connect!, a card game that integrates paper circuits and real-time LED feedback, enabling players to construct functional circuits as part of gameplay. Unlike traditional hybrid games, Connect! embeds feedback directly into physical components while preserving material interaction. We conducted a user study comparing gameplay with and without electronic feedback. Our findings suggest that real-time feedback not only increased engagement but also altered players' behavior, encouraging rule exploration and emergent play. Our work contributes to tangible interaction and game-based learning, demonstrating the potential of low-cost electronics in enhancing interactive experiences.

Connect! game cards

From Data to Discussion: Interfaces for Collective Inquiry and Open-Ended Data Creation
David Hunter (ATLAS PhD student)

Data can enrich our understanding of the world and improve our society. However the datafication of our society comes with challenges for empowering communities. In designing systems for recording and representing data, a theme has emerged of these interfaces as the site of conversations and sense-making, and the participatory nature is valuable beyond the data itself. This insight has led me to investigate tools and experiences that enable open-ended data creation and exploration as a grounding for discussion and prompting action. The goal is to design interfaces and systems for exploring places and futures through data, to empower communities and supporting civic participation, learning and making, situational awareness, and scenario planning. In this pictorial I present five ongoing research projects investigating these ideas.

How to Data Walk

Knitting with unknown trees: assembling a more-than-human practice
Doenja Oogjes, Ege Kökel, Netta Ofer (ATLAS PhD alum), Hsiang-Lin Kuo, Jasmijn Vugts, Troy Nachtigall, Torin Hopkins (ATLAS PhD alum)

In this pictorial, we explore alternative ways of knowing urban trees through a more-than-human lens. Using a municipal tree dataset, we focus on “unknown” trees—entries unclassified due to error, decay, or absence—highlighting the limits of quantification and fixed knowledge systems. Urban trees, while critical for ecosystems, are often shaped by technological interventions (e.g., GIS, IoT sensors, AI diagnostics) that prioritize their utility over other expressions. We engage in knitting as a material inquiry to foreground nonhuman agencies and relational entanglements. Through reflective shifts and compromises, this project questions normative design practices, seeking to amplify nonhuman participation. We make two contributions. Firstly, we offer insights into fostering alternative, relational engagements with urban ecologies. Secondly, we reflect on our process of surfacing and working with agentic capacities, articulating guidance for other design researchers. Through this, we advocate for fragmented approaches that embrace complicity and complexity in more-than-human design.

Designing Interfaces that Support Temporal Work Across Meetings with Generative AI
Rishi Vanukuru (ATLAS PhD student), Payod Panda, Xinyue Chen, Ava Elizabeth Scott, Lev Tankelevitch, Sean Rintel

Temporal work is an essential part of the modern knowledge workplace, where multiple threads of meetings and projects are connected across time by the acts of looking back (retrospection) and ahead (prospection). As we develop Generative AI interfaces to support knowledge work, this lens of temporality can help ground design in real workplace needs. Building upon research in routine dynamics and cognitive science, and an exploratory analysis of real recurring meetings, we develop a framework and a tool for the synergistic exploration of temporal work and the capabilities of Generative AI. We then use these to design a series of interface concepts and prototypes to better support work that spans multiple scales of time. Through this approach, we demonstrate how the design of new Generative AI tools can be guided by our understanding of how work really happens across meetings and projects.

Members of three ATLAS labs show how interactive technology can create possibilities for new means of productivity, data analysis, creativity and play.

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Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:31:49 +0000

Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/17/2025 - 15:31

Michael Kwolek

From implantable devices like pacemakers and brain interfaces to smart wearables, humans are fast becoming more cybernetic than we might realize.

Implanted devices tend to have higher fidelity and functionality than wearables, but require extremely invasive surgery. Smart tech is lower-cost and easy to use, but can be uncomfortable while offering limited functionality.

What if there was a middle ground, a set of technologies that allowed for the best of both worlds? Such solutions could enable people to achieve peak performance in a range of physical and mental activities, simplify ongoing health monitoring, and help those with mobility challenges control the devices that support their daily lives.

Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Project: Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Planning Phase Award: $50,000

The CU Boulder New Frontiers Grant Program is designed to foster groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects with the potential for high impact. “High impact” projects may include the potential for significant advancements in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that exceeds incremental progress and creates new paradigms of understanding.

With support from the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Engineering & Applied Science and the School of Education, New Frontiers is open to any eligible CU Boulder faculty member.

A surprising partnership

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute are working on just that through a unique collaboration toward what they call “cybernetic human advancement.”

Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), and Grace Leslie, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, College of Music), have partnered to study ways to create the functionality of an implantable device with the ease of a wearable.

The project was kickstarted with funding from CU Boulder’s New Frontiers Grant Program.

This 12-month Planning Phase Award, funded through the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), supports project planning and initial data collection for two lines of inquiry.

Real life sci-fi

Cybernetic humans may sound like science fiction, but such technology is very much a reality. Bruns explains, “When we hear the word ‘cyborg,’ we think of a cyberpunk half-robot. But there are really common examples of body-integrated technology like cochlear implants for the hearing impaired or lens replacements for vision-impaired people or cardiac pacemakers for people who have heart conditions.”

He elaborates, “We're going to continue to integrate our bodies with technology more and more. And we'd like to contribute our own piece to this movement to ensure that it's done in a safe and ethical way, and also because we think it's exciting and there are tremendous potential benefits. So we decided to call this domain ‘human enhancement’ as opposed to ‘cyborg’ or ‘cybernetic.’”

The skin as interface

It’s possible the next generation of wearables will not look like the watches and rings we currently see in the market.

Bruns says, “One of the things I do in my lab is try to use the skin as the interface for these human enhancements. These technologies that we're going to merge with the body, I think the skin is really the best for that because it's the least invasive place to put a permanent implant. You usually don't even need a doctor or a hospital if it's small enough. You can just tattoo it, and that's something that almost anybody can do safely. So it's very convenient if you're going to permanently implant some technology in your body to make it be a tattoo.”

For example, you wouldn’t want to wear an EKG monitoring cap on your head all day, but if you could get tattooed with conductive materials that connect to a simple device, that could allow for continuous brainwave monitoring without ongoing discomfort.

Seeking key collaborators

The core team seeks a few more key members during this initial research phase. Carson details what expertise they seek:

Ethicist: “There are a lot of serious ethical questions about these types of technologies. We are actively looking for somebody to be a part of this and inform our team and do their own research on the ethics of this space.”

Circuits expert: “We would [also] like a circuits expert. They might be an electrical engineer—somebody who really knows how to optimize this kind of hardware. I have the expertise to make a special kind of conductive material to build the device and once you have the signals, Grace is really good at doing stuff with those. But in between those two, we need that person who can take the material and construct the exact circuit we want to get the best signal.”

Performance enhancing tattoos

Leslie is excited about the possibility of applying her expertise in neuroscience to studying wearables to enhance athletic performance. “We want to work with the CU football team to develop this augmented football player concept using control theory to figure out what the best type of feedback would be to get them in the right state. The really quick decision making they have to do for who to pass to and when, and the movements that they take, will all be optimized.”

In lieu of starting right away with permanent tattooing, the team aims to design with an even more common application in mind.

Leslie continues, “We're thinking of this being almost like a temporary tattoo. Printing a whole circuit board onto that sticker and then any components that we need to add. So it becomes this all-in-one [device] on the surface of the skin. It would be a combination of, on Carson's side, the ability to think of a completely different form factor for a circuit that involves the skin—it isn't just some standalone device that we then try to attach to the human. And then from my lab’s side, the idea of how you can provide meaningful stimulus and feedback in a way that doesn't require a screen.”

Getting into the flow

Leslie hopes to apply her background in music and audio to create novel sensory stimuli like sounds and haptic feedback (little vibrations similar to what is used in a mobile phone) in place of a screen to help guide people toward achieving a “flow state” of peak performance in a range of activities.

Leslie says, “Haptic feedback is the educational tool that helps you learn what that feels like to be in that state. The principle of biofeedback [is] that eventually if you've practiced it enough, you can reach it without the feedback and then it creates lasting changes.”

Big ideas from new connections

The initial idea for this project started when ATLAS PhD students Joshua Coffie (in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab) and Daniel Llamas Maldonado (in the Brain Music Lab) found mutual interest in their respective research areas. Llamas Maldonado explains, “We were in the Research Methods class together, and I thought his research was really cool. We just started talking and thinking we could do something together.”

This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

From there, the conversation expanded to Leslie and Bruns, who catalyzed the idea by applying for the New Frontiers Grant program. This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

With concurrent lines of research, the key will be to focus the research in this initial phase. Leslie concludes, “It's easy to think of science fiction scenarios, but the hard part is coming up with concrete experiments to run that will be really self-contained and controlled, and that are going to prove the things that we need to prove to build the larger concept. And that is also the fun part.”

Nanomaterials and neuroscience researchers aim to build brain/body interfaces that enhance performance, improve health monitoring and support mobility.

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Image source: Adobe stock

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:27:46 +0000

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant Michael Kwolek Wed, 06/11/2025 - 10:27

Michael Kwolek

Plastic Fertilizer: Toward Sustainable Waste-Stream Plastics with Low Carbon Content and Cost

PI: Carson J. Bruns, ATLAS Institute + Paul M. Rady Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

Co-PI: Merritt R. Turetsky, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) + Dept. of Ecology

“We must replace the ubiquitous 'forever plastics' with sustainable plastics that (i) degrade fast and harmlessly in the wild and (ii) minimize emissions by combining high recyclability with low carbon content.”

Plastics are a problem. They are made with petroleum, are rarely recycled, and turn into microplastics over time—an increasingly intractable global environmental and health concern.

Current bio-based alternatives have yet to see widespread adoption for a number of reasons. Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), aims to change all that with a new line of research in his Emergent Nanotechnology Lab focused on turning agricultural materials into bio-based plastics that can be more easily recycled, composted or even used as fertilizer.

Bruns was recently awarded a 2025 Research & Innovation Seed Grant from CU Boulder’s Research and Innovation Office for this work.

We discussed the thinking behind this research and possible applications (interview lightly edited for clarity):

What are the challenges with bio-based plastics?

The biggest challenge that everybody is dealing with in sustainable plastics right now is that the current options for bio-based and compostable plastics are not actually very good. They don't compete with the oil-based plastics in terms of how tough and flexible they are, so people don't like to use them as much because they crack and they're brittle.

And in reality, you cannot throw such plastics onto your backyard compost pile. They need special conditions to properly break down. You need a composting facility that heats the compost up to 60°C and it has all these fans and equipment to circulate it, and even then, it still doesn't work that well. [Note: This is one of the reasons why A1 Organics, Boulder, Colorado’s main composting partner, stopped accepting these biodegradable plastics.]

Bruns and his team have partnered with Merritt R. Turetsky, Director of Arctic Security; Professor, Ecology, for key elements of this research.

How did the collaboration with professor Turetsky come about?

We've been working on sustainable alternative materials to oil-based plastics for almost the whole time I've been at CU. But the collaboration with Professor Turetsky came when we started trying to characterize the biodegradability of the materials we've been making in the lab.

We've worked with a number of different things—rubbery materials, hydrogels, elastomers, and adhesives [as] alternatives to oil-based rubbers and adhesives. If you want to characterize how biodegradable something is, there are different types of experiments you can do. We approached professor Turetsky to get her advice on how we could go about doing that.

Over the last two semesters, we've had an undergraduate student named Roan Gerrald. He did his honors thesis on this work with advice from professor Turetsky and Aseem Visal, my graduate student. He's done our first compostability experiments on some of the plastic alternative materials that we've already made that are not the ones we proposed in this project, but ones that we have in the lab.

Carson Bruns

What materials are you testing to make these new polymers?

The recipe is [a key] innovation. In general, what you do when you're trying to make a sustainable plastic is you buy some very high-purity materials from a chemical supplier and that makes your science easy to do because you know exactly what you have.

Just buying this molecule in a gallon drum is economically not at all competitive with petroleum. So how do we make something that is cost-competitive?

The idea is to try to recover these molecules as starting materials from waste so that they're not so expensive. You're a potato chip or french fry manufacturer, and you have to wash all of your vegetables, or even at intermediate stages you're soaking them in water or washing them with water, and then that water waste goes somewhere. But it has valuable stuff in it like starches and proteins from the vegetables. So we'd like to recover those valuable substances from the wastewater.

You're using these different materials that happen to be fertilizers in themselves.

The problem with using carbon for plastic is that even if it is highly recyclable, even if it is compostable, It's still going to turn into carbon dioxide at the end of its life.

"Agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end."

We choose elements that plants need so that we avoid the carbon but still maintain compostability or biodegradability. But we can't get rid of the carbon completely—it's more of a carbon minimization than a carbon avoidance or removal in order for it to still behave as a plastic and have that kind of flexibility.

So if we can make a plastic that has not very much carbon, but it has a lot of other stuff that is good for soil, then you can use it as a fertilizer instead of as compost, because agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end.

What do you hope to accomplish at the end of the initial 18-month grant?

I hope that we have at least one material that has good properties and that we show fertilizes soil. That's a very ambitious goal to have in 18 months, but we're going to try.

What sorts of products might be possible with this plastic alternative?

We want to make packaging plastics, something that you could cover your steak with at the grocery store or something like Styrofoam. But these are soft and flexible, and because of that they're a little bit harder to make from these low-carbon elements.

So I would predict that it will be harder for us to make those things, but if we can make the kind of flexible, more stretchy ones, then we can look to things like packaging, plastic bags, Ziploc bags, Saran Wrap, stuff like that. But if we can [only make] brittle things, then it's gonna be more like forks and cups and plates.

How might this research come to life in the real world?

Maybe in the future if it worked really well, there could be a reuse or recycling stream where you put it in your mixed-stream recycling and then they sort it and send it to somebody who is going to turn it into fertilizer.

But the other option is that you throw it in your at-home compost and it can degrade there and that would be great, too.

The Emergent Nanotechnology Lab team has begun research to develop new bioplastics made to be used as fertilizer at end-of-life.

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ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:46:24 +0000

ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/10/2025 - 09:46

Creative Technology & Design master's students developed a system to help birdwatchers with mobility challenges continue to participate in this popular pastime.

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The Tank supports artists, and a small community of a couple thousand residents

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:47:37 +0000

The Tank supports artists, and a small community of a couple thousand residents Michael Kwolek Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:47

The B2 partnership with The Tank continues despite NEA funding cuts. This creative collaboration supports rural communities and experimental artists.

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Robots and chemistry isn’t just a fun combo - Bruns says it’s the future

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:34:59 +0000

Robots and chemistry isn’t just a fun combo - Bruns says it’s the future Michael Kwolek Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:34

Carson Bruns and his team are developing robots that collaborate with humans in lab settings to reduce work burdens and improve safety.

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