UARTS FEAST

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

The SMART (Sound and Media Art) Lab is an artistic research lab where students explore the intersection of art, technology, and science to create sound and media art. Our multidisciplinary approach blends sound design, human-computer interaction, NIME, artistic sonification, and bio-inspired art.

Deep Drawing is an intermedia project that explores the sound of drawing and writing through a deep learning model. An AI co-performer interprets the musical gestures of the human co-performer drawing on an amplified wooden box to create projected visual drawings corresponding to the sound.

Designers of digital musical instruments have worked to make them accessible to people with cognitive or motor disabilities. The TAMIE project advances this by allowing users to train their own instruments, using machine learning to map their movements to musical output, emphasizing consistent gesture recognition for effective interaction.

Studying the interaction between a human artist (i.e., a painter) and an embodied AI agent (i.e., a robot) to quantitatively capture their creative process using biometrics.

Project supporting and presenting immersive and real-time digitally mediated tabletop roleplaying game experiences that combine improvisational performance, new technologies, and experimental interactive storytelling forms to produce experiences that explore queer, decolonial, and feminist futures.

Creative exploration of visual perception and depiction via the design, creation, and use of experimental cameras through a collaboration between artists and engineers.

This project proposes a new class of eye imaging device for children featuring an embodied robot character. We seek to transform the sterile, cold, and clinical pediatric eye imaging process into an engaging activity that instead invites children into an interactive partnership. This robotic eye imaging character may enable routine eye examination in young patient populations that will substantially improve the standard of care in pediatric ophthalmology.

This team integrates LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and photogrammetry, 3D point-cloud data captured from artifacts, buildings, urban environments, and landscapes that are animated through the gaming platform and advanced 3D creation tool, Unreal Engine, to develop empathic, inclusive spatial narratives through immersive interfaces.