UARTS FEAST

faculty engineering/arts student teams
SMART Lab
This project explores performance-oriented site-specific sound installation that combines elements of bio-inspired creativity and wearable interfaces for musical expression, aiming to create immersive and multi-sensory experiences that redefine the possibilities of artistic expression and transform our perception of space and sound.
Devising for the Shadows: Puppetry in Performance
Create the world of shadow puppet theatre and bring some of our North campus spaces to life through site-specific puppet performance. Devise the world these puppets will live in!
Visual Art and Performance for Social Justice and Self-Healing
This FEAST project aims to expand research and artistic practices to address myriad forms of oppression, such as racism/colorism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and others. This project requires artistic, engineering, and technological skills needed to build props, installations, and performance spaces.
THE BIG CITY: Lost and Found in XR
No copies are known to exist of 1928 lost film THE BIG CITY, only still photographs, a cutting continuity, and a detailed scenario of the film. Using Unreal Engine, detailed 3D model renderings, and live performance, students will take users back in time into the fictional Harlem Black Bottom cabaret and clubs shown in the film.
Web-First, Accessible Game Engine Design
A genre-focused, web-first game engine with the accessibility of MIT Scratch and the professionalism / commercial flexibility of RPG Maker. This project will provide beginning game designers with a fast and effective means to prototype their RPG, RTS, and Tower Defense game ideas, while providing U-M students with “in-the-field” gamedev and webdev experience.
Abriendo Caminos: developing engineering pathways card
This FEAST project will create engaging educational materials designed specifically for middle school Hispanic students to describe and encourage pathways into engineering careers, especially those in the material sciences.
Visualizing Telematic Music Performance
The goal of this project is to explore methods of incorporating visual communication of effort, gesture, and movement into telematic performance without video transmission. Practical experiments with different sensing techniques, including infrared motion capture, inertial measurement, electromyography, and force sensing will be coupled with novel digitally fabricated mechatronic displays.
The student team will explore current participatory design theory and practices toward ideation/ fabrication/production, and test developed pieces that will move forward our understanding and application of participatory design.
The SparkVotes Parties project is a series of games designed to educate and energize college-age voters. Our collaborative team will be developing imaginative ways to gamify the skills and knowledge needed for campus civic participation in the 2022 election.
ORBIT stands for the Online Resource for Building Intercultural Teams—and it’s one of many projects underway in the ORBIT Lab! We’re also developing a tool for middle schoolers to team up on social justice issues, working on a book called Creative Resilience, and collaborating with faculty in pharmacy and cardiology on an interactive dashboard to help providers better care for heart failure patients.
Agrobots: Robots for the farm and garden
To create a healthier and more sustainable future, we need to create ways to make organic food less expensive to produce and thus more accessible to everyone. This UARTS FEAST project will explore ways to use robots to assist with organic farming and gardening tasks and will collaborate with the U-M Campus Farm and feature working with a real robot to perform tasks related to agriculture.
This UARTS FEAST project, "Picturing the Structure of Musical Spaces," will study and construct visual representations of music using mathematics. Drawing on scholarship that represents musical chords as points in geometric spaces, we will explore new ways of “picturing” these musical spaces by constructing visualizations of their structure, patterns, and symmetries.
Studio JOY draws upon interventionist art practices as a form of activism in the face of institutional betrayal. Studio JOY will engage in making practices that may include the construction of superhero or mascot costumes, public signage, and/or screenplays.
This UARTS FEAST project will design, prototype and test an aerospace vehicle to locate and identify endangered plant species in wetland environments. The vehicle should minimally disrupt plant and animal wildlife. Your test client is the University's Botanical Gardens.
This team will make Korean Art Song (Gagok) more accessible to English speaking students by finding Korean composed song scores, creating English translations, phoneticizations and spoken recordings of song texts, and organizing these materials into an accessible database.
This team will conduct a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of shadows to expand and hybridize conceptions of shadows, from a range of fields, as a way of mining their artistic potential and imagining their use in experiential and immersive art encounters.
This team will enable the architecture student to translate and test spatial ideas in the design process through immersive technologies using point clouds generated from photogrammetry and LiDAR. In addition to scanning and photogrammetry, this team will test design methodologies (experimenting with VFX and VR), create templates for workflow documentation, and establish a database for site scans and student projects.
“22/26 Midwest” is a net-zero building concept for the US Midwest climate condition. The technology has the goal to reduce the green-house gas emission for building operation, to improve the comfort of the occupants and to reduce the construction cost. The UARTS Student Team will work on prototypes, programming and control technologies to develop the “22/26 Midwest” project.
The project provides sounds and color analogs of people who exist across multiple axes of physical, emotional, cultural and social divergent identities. The project considers imputations of combinations of sound, color, and visuals in presenting all data - including potentially very identifiable combinations.
The goal of this project is to develop a new genre of inclusive augmented reality games and room-sized interactive systems that remove physical and social barriers to play. The project addresses the unmet need of players with different mobility abilities to play and exercise together in spaces such as school gymnasiums, community centers, and family entertainment centers.