Feature

Balfour’s Memory Care patients treated to soothing Longmont Symphony experience

Michael Kwolek — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:54:54 +0000

Balfour’s Memory Care patients treated to soothing Longmont Symphony experience Michael Kwolek Fri, 12/05/2025 - 11:54

Grace Leslie noted that "for people living with Alzheimer’s or dementia, both anecdotal and experimental evidence point to the durability of music in the brain."

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Coding with creativity: How ATLAS students think beyond algorithms

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:07:35 +0000

Coding with creativity: How ATLAS students think beyond algorithms Michael Kwolek Mon, 12/01/2025 - 11:07

Caitlin Rockett

With his computer plugged into a projector at the front of the room, Hudson Blankner, a freshman in Gabe Johnson’s Computational Foundations 1 class, displayed his final project: a trio of classic games—rock, paper, scissors; tic tac toe; and table tennis.

The assignment required students to build an interactive game using the programming skills they’d learned over the semester, and to experiment with different problem-solving strategies—including, if they wanted, “vibe” coding, the practice of prompting artificial intelligence models to generate code.

Blankner did try using AI, and he wasn’t subtle about his feelings.

“I coded this all in one prompt, but I really hate vibe coding,” Blankner told the class. “AI is like a Division I gaslighter. It took 15 prompts to make the game look like this.”

Johnson expects students to explore AI tools, as he sees more and more companies requiring software engineers to use AI to some extent to program more, and faster. But Johnson also expects students—like professional software engineers—to understand the logic behind their programs and learn to write their own code, that way they know what AI gets right, wrong, good, bad or mediocre.

“These students, for the most part, have not programmed before—they’re coming into this class fresh,” said Johnson, who teaches introductory computer programming courses for the Creative Technology and Design (CTD) curriculum at the ATLAS Institute. “Maybe some of them had taken ‘computer science classes’ in high school, but that’s often just building a web page.”

Engineering meets design

CTD degrees are granted through the College of Engineering, where coding and computational thinking are essential skills across disciplines. At ATLAS, CTD majors build that engineering foundation alongside deep design practice, giving them a holistic and strategic approach to problem solving. Rather than following trends or treating design as aesthetics alone, CTD students learn to analyze human needs and create solutions that are usable, meaningful and durable. That means students not only learn to code, they also build skills in web development, interaction design, physical prototyping, audio and video production, digital media, theory and project management.

“I think CTD students can better explain their programming work,” Johnson said. “Yes, they have the technical knowledge, but they fit that knowledge into the broader context of society, of designing for humans. Communicating what you are doing is almost more important than the thing you are doing. CTD students are able to explain not just what they did, but why and how and what else they considered. Telling a story is much richer—much more human.”

Creative logic in action

When presenting midterm projects, Johnson found first-time programmers in his Computational Foundations I class thinking outside the engineering box to solve problems. Laura Baker, a sophomore, wrestled with how to determine when a player-controlled bee had reached a flower at the center of a maze.

“This was an annoyingly difficult problem that seemed so simple,” Baker said. “I took an artist's approach using a simple Boolean statement and an array of RGB color codes: If the bee was touching the appropriate color, then it stopped moving. I was very proud because I didn’t use AI to help me. I tend to lean toward artsy solutions in all of my projects. The only setback with the solution I used for the bee in the maze is that you cannot change the color of the walls of the maze because then the RGB code will not link back up to the if statement correctly. It worked for my presentation, though.”

While Baker could have created a traditional hitbox math test to determine where rectangles intersect, Johnson was impressed with her solution: “She needed to figure it out, and she had a creative solution rather than the ‘right’ solution.”

Of course, Johnson teaches Computational Foundations students the “right” solutions as well, but he fosters unconventional thinking because it can lead to innovation—more necessary than ever in a world driven by generative artificial intelligence.

“Programming is in upheaval right now because of AI,” Johnson said. “Future programmers are going into a world where large language models and AI chatbots can do all sorts of creative-approximate stuff. Programmers need skills that AI can’t approximate. One of the main functions of a university is to teach people to think critically, because now we have machines that can do thinking-like things. So future programmers can either evaluate the machines and push back against them, or just roll over and let the machines win.”

A ‘joyful experience’

Johnson, who also teaches introductory programming classes for computer science majors, believes creativity is necessary for coding. Far too many people, he said, see programming as “an arcane mathematical thing.”

Creative Technology & Design

Learn more about the ATLAS Institute and CTD programs including undergraduate major, minor and certificate; professional master’s; and PhD.

Online info sessions about all CTD programs are held regularly throughout the year.

Prospective students can email atlascommunications@colorado.edu to schedule a student-led tour.

That creative mindset shows up in his students’ work. Computational Foundations I students blended math and design in midterm projects, with one student creating billowing clouds moving across the sky, and another coding a Price Is Right-style Plinko game simulator—both of which present a visualization of a Gaussian distribution.

“I teach Computational Foundations I basically in the same way I teach Computer Science 1300, except in Computational Foundations I, I have much more leeway in making it fun and design-oriented,” Johnson said. “I provide the most creative and joyful experience that you can have when learning to code, and let students figure out for themselves whether they want to learn more. And because it's so fun, many of them are enthusiastic about doing it.”

Baker—who had “very minimal coding experience before starting Computational Foundations”—said her view of coding has changed dramatically since taking the class.

“This class has shown me how creative coding is, that you can design with code and get an awesome, artistic output,” Baker said. “Coding has given me a new medium to make art with, and I’m very excited about that.”

Computational Foundations I teaches code as a technical and expressive skill.

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DNA origami: unfolding genetic breakthroughs

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:39:32 +0000

DNA origami: unfolding genetic breakthroughs Michael Kwolek Tue, 11/18/2025 - 10:39

Michael Kwolek

Lab Venture Challenge

Johnson and Alistar competed as finalists in CU Boulder’s 2025 Lab Venture Challenge where their technology generated much interest from industry leaders.

Access to DNA is crucial in many branches of biomedical research. But making long strands of DNA is time consuming, error-prone and expensive.

Over the years, researchers have worked to make DNA synthesis more efficient, with important contributions made by Marvin Caruthers, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the �Թ�� of Colorado Boulder. This research has advanced a range of biomedical fields including drug and vaccine development, pathogen tests, and cancer diagnostics.

Making DNA involves complex biochemical and mechanical processes to assemble a strand base by base. At each stage, there is a small chance of failure, but in doing this process over and over for more bases, that chance increases.

The process of creating a DNA strand longer than 1,000 bases often takes several weeks, which can hinder research cycles. To solve this, biotech companies have pursued incremental efficiency gains in strand construction.

Now researchers in the ATLAS Institute’s Living Matter Lab aim to rethink DNA synthesis altogether.

A new way to build DNA

Lab director and assistant professor Mirela Alistar and post-doctoral researcher Joshua Johnson are working to develop nanorobots that will more quickly and accurately build DNA to meet researchers’ specifications in a matter of days instead of weeks.

They are employing DNA origami—a creative technique for shaping these building blocks of life—to create a nanorobot to speed the process of making new DNA strands. “It folds much like paper origami, but it is made of DNA,” Johnson noted. “Our particular nanorobot is rectangular with a rotating arm element. It is about 2,000 times smaller than the width of human hair.”

DNA origami research dates back to 2006, with scientists making simple but precise nanoscale shapes and patterns. Alistar and Johnson aim to apply this technique to the mechanical arrangement of molecules. “We are taking existing scientific concepts and combining them in new ways—much like engineering a normal sized robot but at the molecular scale," Johnson elaborated.

Alistar explained the team’s contribution to DNA origami research as “designing the DNA structure that becomes a robot such that it is more stable, translating the fabrication process from extremely highly advanced labs to a little bit of a lower-key lab in computer science, which means we have to be inventive with a lot of the processes.”

The right place for the research

The ATLAS Institute’s relationships with the College of Engineering and Applied Science create space for such breakthrough research. “We are interdisciplinary—I'm confident saying that,” Alistar said. “We do work with DNA for bacteriophages. We also work with microfluidics, which is also needed for the DNA nanorobot. So there are a lot of intersections in which we saw the potential for developing a DNA origami-based project in the lab.”

Sensing great promise in their research, the team is seeking a commercialization path to reach the real-world. “This nanomachine process that we developed could be substantially faster than anything else in the industry,” Johnson noted. “There is a clear market need: biotech and pharmaceutical companies wait weeks for their large DNA strands, and that slows down research.”

According to early market analysis, these companies would be willing to pay more to get their DNA faster. “We've identified that the gene synthesis market would benefit most because they need the longest DNA, they need it the fastest and they're willing to pay the most for it,” Johnson said.

Alistar also noted potential in cell-free research. “A lot of development in biology goes toward using merely DNA, not living cells. Applications are mostly in vaccines.” If, for example, you could more quickly make a vaccine even in remote places, that could have major implications for global health.

To commercialize this research, Alistar and Johnson are pursuing “a lot of support from CU Boulder and the state of Colorado in getting to an actual product,” Alistar explained. “If everything goes right, we're gonna be enrolled in a national-level program for two months of customer discovery research.”

The team hopes to demonstrate market feasibility of their new synthesis method within three years to improve one of the main bottlenecks in biotech research and help smooth the way toward improved vaccines, gene therapy and more personalized medicine.

Living Matter Lab designs nanorobots for DNA production to speed biomedical research.

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Minds in rhythm

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:33:16 +0000

Minds in rhythm Michael Kwolek Tue, 11/11/2025 - 09:33

Michael Kwolek

Imagine the cacophony of a conversation in which everyone talks, listens and responds at the same time.

Trained musicians performing together can make a similar set of sensory inputs and brain activity truly resonate. Though a feature of the human experience for thousands of years, interbrain synchronization when playing music is not well understood.

As a member of the Brain Music Lab, ATLAS PhD student Thiago Roque has developed novel techniques for studying these nuanced dynamics with the aim to expand our understanding not only of musical performance, but also of human-to-human collaboration and connection more broadly.

In his teens, Roque fell in love with music while beginning to develop his engineering skills. “I always wanted to be an engineer because I wanted to understand how things work, mostly toys and mechanics, electrical stuff,” he said, “but at that point, I also wanted to understand music.”

When he got his first electronic keyboard, he realized, “An electrical engineer designed this to make music, so I realized that I could connect both things.”

After earning BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering at �Թ�� of Campinas in Brazil, Roque came to study with Grace Leslie at Georgia Tech, then transferred to CU Boulder when Leslie opened her Brain Music Lab in the ATLAS Institute.

“Thiago has been a really integral part of the Brain Music Lab,” Leslie noted. “A lot of that has to do with his engineering background—it's rare to find graduate students who have the musical sophistication to be working on these projects and can rise to the occasion when it comes to developing custom technology for the research questions that we have.”

Studying brains in motion

Analyzing brain activity in moving bodies is surprisingly challenging—standard EEG data is captured in subjects who remain still.

Roque has studied how dancers’ brains sync when they perform together, using his electrical engineering background to develop ways to improve the quality of EEG data in moving subjects.

To compensate for all the action involved, he sewed motion sensors into the EEG caps and modified hardware to read neck and eye movement to improve data quality. This led to more ambitious plans with an even higher degree of difficulty.

The string ensemble experiment

Having dreamed for years of being able to analyze a string quartet performing a piece of music, Roque explained, “we needed all the equipment to be precisely synchronized, so we had to design this hardware that sends triggers and synchronizes everything. I designed and assembled the printed circuit boards myself.”

He spent months incorporating off-the-shelf EEG equipment, accelerometers and other sensors with custom-designed components to normalize the data and sync it between all the musicians.

The next step was finding a quartet willing to participate in the experiment. Luckily, CU Boulder’s College of Music—across the street from the ATLAS Institute—is home to several student quartets, including the ensemble that ultimately agreed to participate.

Roque said, “We wanted to work with students here because we know they will have regular rehearsals. They will have just met each other at the beginning of the semester, so they are new to it. We are planning to measure them at the end of the semester so we can see the progress, how they develop.”

The research team

This project has not been a solo gig. Daniel Ethridge, Daniel Llamas Maldonado and Sophia Mehdizadeh from the Brain Music Lab—as well as several master’s and undergraduate students—have been instrumental in executing the string quartet research.

An interdisciplinary performance

For Roque, the ATLAS Institute offers several unique elements that make this type of research possible. “It's an interdisciplinary environment that fosters challenging research with high risks but potentially high payouts, and it's a very creative place,” he noted.

“Thinking about the �Թ�� of Colorado, I had this opportunity to enroll in this triple PhD program. I'm getting a PhD in creative technology and design, neuroscience and cognitive science.”

Leslie explained how this research fits into the Brain Music Lab’s larger mission: “While we are focusing on technology and developing new technology and studying how humans interface with it, what sets us apart is our focus on the really human element to it.”

The next movement

Roque aims to continue studying this young quartet to determine if their brain activity syncs more thoroughly as they continue to perform together. He would also like to study graduate musicians and seasoned professionals to learn how interbrain coupling may change based on the experience level of the musicians.

Expanding the scope

Brain Music Lab director, Grace Leslie, recently performed a solo improvisational piece, Inside the Tank, in the B2 Black Box Theater, integrating EEG headset and body sensors.

The lab team also outfitted several audience members with EEG monitors, giving Roque additional data to study the physiological responses of those experiencing live music.

Roque also looks forward to bringing this technology to the stage. Plans are in the works for a string quartet performance in the spring semester with a huge visualization of live physiological data to give the audience a sense of the musicians’ synchronization.

“A lot of it is developing this technology that we hopefully can use in the future to continue to study musical group dynamics,” Leslie said, “but there's also this human-computer interaction application where he's done some of the foundational research to show that we can develop brain-computer interfaces that can be social.”

This research may reveal insights as to how human connection and collaboration work. Over time, it could lead to tools and techniques to improve our ability to sync with each other when working on complex tasks—whether that means performing in a string quartet, playing a team sport or simply holding a nuanced conversation.

ATLAS PhD student studies how brain activity syncs when musicians perform together.

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CU Boulder graduate student named a Google PhD fellow

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:02:04 +0000

CU Boulder graduate student named a Google PhD fellow Michael Kwolek Mon, 10/27/2025 - 10:02

Hye-Young Jo of computer science and the ATLAS Institute will be using the funding to research human-computer interactions.

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Building robots, building connections

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:41:53 +0000

Building robots, building connections Michael Kwolek Thu, 10/23/2025 - 15:41

On a Tuesday afternoon at a Denver public school, a group of elementary students gather around tables piled with Lego bricks, laughing and chatting as they carefully follow instructions to assemble their creations. A few minutes later, they’re chasing a small robot car around the classroom, laughing as it bumps along the floor.

Scenes like this are familiar to Casey Hunt, a PhD candidate at the ATLAS Institute. Each week, Hunt visits four Denver public schools as part of a collaboration with Inspire to Learn and Imagine, helping K–5 students explore engineering and coding through Lego robotics.

The after-school program uses the Lego WeDo 2.0 ecosystem—a kid-friendly robotics kit that empowers young learners to build moving creations and program them with simple code. “The goal isn’t just to teach them mechanics or coding, it’s to give them space to build, test and problem-solve together,” Hunt explained. “They take a lot of ownership over their creations, and that’s really fun to watch.”

Hunt facilitates each club session, helping students work through the weekly project, teaching basic engineering concepts and encouraging teamwork. All four schools tackle the same project each week, but students always find ways to make it their own—like the pair who built a sidecar for their minifigure passengers, then raced it gleefully across the library.

“It’s so fun to see them take pride in their creations,” Hunt said. “They find ways to make each build reflect their personalities or friendships, and I love watching them put their own spin on the designs.”

Beyond the joy of seeing students bring their ideas to life, the program aligns closely with Hunt’s academic pursuit. Her research focuses on how materials can teach people through making, drawing on constructionist learning theories. “I’m interested in how these ideas from education can be adapted to participatory design, building with communities,” Hunt said. “In Lego club, I get to watch how kids naturally negotiate, share ideas and make design decisions together—it’s a different context, but very similar to the collaboration I study.”

Hunt reflects on how these young learners engage with core STEM skills: reading and following design instructions, iterating when things don’t work and collaborating with peers to solve problems. “Their approach is actually a lot like my undergraduate students, just at an age-appropriate level,” she noted.

For ATLAS, programs like this reflect a broader commitment to community engagement and inclusive STEM education. The institute’s partnership with Inspire to Learn and Imagine extends its impact beyond the university—fostering creativity, curiosity and confidence in the next generation of makers.

By connecting university researchers with local classrooms, outreach efforts like the Lego club not only support young learners but also give graduate students meaningful teaching and mentorship experiences outside the lab.

“This kind of work shows how our research and expertise can ripple outward,” Hunt said. “It’s a reminder that what we study in the lab connects to real people—and real joy—in the community.”

ATLAS PhD candidate Casey Hunt brings STEM learning to local classrooms with Lego robotics.

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The weight of words in the age of AI

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:41:52 +0000

The weight of words in the age of AI Michael Kwolek Mon, 10/20/2025 - 11:41

Caitlin Rockett

ATLAS Academic Programs

Go to the ATLAS Institute website to learn more about Creative Technology & Design programs including undergraduate major, minor and certificates; professional master’s and PhD.

Info sessions: online sessions on CTD programs are held throughout the year.
Tours: Email atlascommunications@colorado.edu to book a student-led tour.

ATLAS Associate Professor Joel Swanson thinks a lot about the weight of words. He has calculated that an average-length English word on newsprint weighs about 5 grams—a digital word has a nearly imperceptible weight.

But it is the philosophical matter at the heart of the idiom that was the central focus for a recent first-year engineering seminar led by Swanson: What is the figurative weight of words as humans increasingly turn to generative artificial intelligence to write?

“AI is getting so good,” said Swanson, who teaches part of the undergraduate Creative Technology and Design (CTD) curriculum, which has degrees granted by the College of Engineering and Applied Science. “I could use ChatGPT to come up with an essay prompt for my students, and then they would respond to that prompt with AI, and then I would grade it, and back and forth. What does that communicate? It's saying words don't matter anymore. So I was really invested in coming up with a project that would show students that words are powerful—that the words they speak and write are meaningful because they wrote them.”

As a tenured professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society, Swanson and his colleagues weave humanities and ethics into their engineering courses, with a goal of fostering well-rounded engineers. With that goal always in mind, Swanson asked his students in the First-Year Seminar—a five-week elective for first-year students in Engineering Connections—to write the first sentence of their memoir, “something AI couldn’t do a good job with,” he said. Then students pushed their creativity further by transforming their words into a vibrant, layered image using a Risograph printer.

The task—and the seminar itself—is purposely outside traditional math-and-science-based engineering education, and combined with Swanson’s signature focus on language and technology, students got a firsthand look at life as a CTD student.

Before they wrote their sentences, Swanson’s students—along with more 1,000 other Engineering First-Year Seminar students—spent the first three weeks of the course discussing texts from authors such as Plato, Thomas Merton and Audrey Lorde, zeroing in on university community values like belonging, agency, ownership, inclusivity and service.

“The essays are carefully chosen to challenge these students to think about why they're at the university and what's at stake in terms of higher education,” Swanson said. “The seminar gives students a very high-contact experience to balance out the rest of engineering, which can feel a little anonymous at times.”

Since fall 2023, nearly 70 instructors—with at least one from every major degree program in engineering—have taught 164 sections of the First-Year Seminar, with an average of 19 students per section. Engineering Dean Keith Molenaar has taught a section since the seminar’s inception. Instructors get the last two weeks of the seminar to cultivate the values discussed in the assigned texts through their own areas of expertise and interest. The previous two times Swanson taught the seminar, he used the 1982 dystopian sci-fi film Blade Runner to examine the nature of humanity in the age of AI. But for his most recent iteration of the class, Swanson wanted to do something “a little bit different,” while still focusing on language, creativity and technology.

“We talked about the greatest first sentences in English literature, like ‘Call me Ishmael,’ from Moby Dick,” Swanson said. “It can be confusing, it can be loaded, it can be offensive, but it sets the tone for the rest of the novel.”

Once students had workshopped their sentences, Swanson gave them a crash course on graphic design so they could turn their sentences into Risograph prints, a cross between screen printing and photocopying where one color is printed at a time. Because paper must be fed through the Risograph printer multiple times—once for each color—minor misalignments between layers result in a charming, handmade aesthetic.

“All of their designs impressed me, and some of them brought me to tears,” Swanson said. “I showed them some examples of things I had created and different ways of using the Risograph and then just let them at it. I think students are already so in tune with visual design because they're seeing design of language in social media every day, so they understand what fonts communicate certain vibes.”

At the end of the five weeks, students signed and exchanged prints, then sealed their own design (along with their Blue Book responses to the readings earlier in the seminar) in an envelope with a promise to Swanson to open them upon graduation.

“This is where you are right now—in four or five years, where are you going to be?” Swanson asked them to consider. “I asked them to put it on their calendar to open this package up and think about who they were in that first semester of college.”

For some students, CTD’s focus on project-based learning is a perfect fit, particularly for self-motivated students who want to explore their own ideas. With electives in game design, wearable electronics, big data, virtual reality, neurohacking and more, Swanson’s section of the College of Engineering’s First-Year Seminar can act as a gateway to CTD, where students see and feel the human and artistic side of technology. But no matter their degree focus, Swanson hopes students walk away from the seminar with an appreciation of the role creativity plays in engineering.

“My mantra for this class was: How can I curate the best out of them as humans and as engineers,” Swanson said, “to get them to ask those questions that they're not going to get asked anywhere else in their engineering education.”

ATLAS faculty–led seminar challenges first-year engineering students to explore the power of language in a digital age.

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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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