Organelle View is a collaboration between Chris Landau and Gabriel Harp from the School of Art and Design, Jamie Cope from Information Science, and faculty advisor Dr. Anuj Kumar from the Life Science Institute. This partnership's goal is to take an existing resource (Oganelle DB) and create a visual front-end depicting protein localizations in yeast cells. This aesthetically-biased visualization approach replaces the conventional use of text in in order to take advantage of its spatial dimensions.

Technology companies have developed a wide array of applications that introduce individuals and facilitate communication for purposes ranging from dating to establishing new business relationships. There is a need for similar applications in the University environment to facilitate collaboration for academic purposes ranging from creating study groups on the fly to holding online office hours.

By building an infrastructure to introduce and connect individuals based on physical location, class registration, group membership, academic interests, and other relationships, we will lay the groundwork for the development of a multitude of next-generation collaborative learning and communication applications. Additionally, as part of the scope of this project, we will develop a proof of concept University-wide IM system that takes advantage of this underlying infrastructure.

Local?/Global is an experiment in Education, Technology, and Human - Computer Interaction.

Our team consists of Makiko Kawamura - School of Art & Design, Leilah Lyons and Joseph Lee - Computer Science and Engineering, Richard Vath - School of Education, and Chris Quintana - School of Education Faculty advisor

Together we are building the M.U.S.H.I. (Multi User Simulation w/ Handheld Integration) framework . M.U.S.H.I. lets us create a virtual sandbox where multiple users can interact simultaneously in a community interface - using handhelds as portals into a virtual world.

This project 's title refers to the writings of Antonin Artaud, who proposed a "Theater of Cruelty" in France during the 1930's. In his manifestos and his larger work "The Theater and Its Double", Artaud invoked a fundamentally sincere and "essential theater", which would abandon the confining norms of the contemporary "artistic spectacle" to create an immediate experience

The Question: How can we use technology to regain our lost experience by making multiple modes of information reception possible simultaneously? How can the now static human body be repositioned in space as a moving, feeling entity? How can our senses be challenged, enhanced, or altered completely via technological mediation? How can the senses be reconnected and dangerously reconstructed? How can the senses be privileged, making signified experiences lived ones?

Our collaborative team views the CAVE and motion capture equipment as a technology with the potential for use as a medium for creative expression. Our goal in this project is to study how people can use the technology at hand to create content - not to explicitly create new technology. In this pursuit we hope to design a system which uses existing technology (CAVE projection and motion capture) to create and modify content in a virtual world.

The public and private spaces Muslims have built in Detroit, their mosques, homes, schools, and neighborhoods, are products of careful thought and negotiation. In this project, a team of UM faculty and graduate students will examine how communal places and institutions have been made Muslim in Detroit, focusing on processes of building, inhabiting, and display. For more information, visit our worksite at http://www.umich.edu/~biid/