4/13/2026 Bill Bell for Illinois Physics
Illinois Physics Professor Paul Kwiat's highly successful physics-themed escape-room outreach program, LabEscape, continues to captivate and educate. The new escape mission will run for the next several months at the Digital Computer Lab in Urbana.
Written by Bill Bell for Illinois Physics
A fake space rock sits in the corner, sensors trained on it. A C-cell battery doubling as a maglev train shoots across a tabletop. LEDs course through white tubing. Does the rate at which they are appearing mean anything? What about the sequences of colors?
LabEscape’s newest escape room—called “Dark Matter Disaster”—debuted at Engineering Open House 2026. It will run for the next several months at the U of I’s Digital Computer Lab.
This is LabEscape’s fifth iteration. On previous missions, teams of participants have saved a genius scientist by figuring out her quantum encryption techniques, saved her research funding, and even developed the cure for a memory-erasing virus with the help of a distributed quantum computer.
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“We do a prebrief before the missions with some fun science and some concepts that are relevant to the concepts in the room. Then we’re pretty hands off. But the puzzles tend to be hard, so we do give lots of hints,” said Danaan Perry, a physics major who has been part of the LabEscape team since last year. She helped take the previous mission on the road to high schools in the Chicago region.
“After the mission, we debrief on the things that happened in the room and the puzzles the team solved” to help the teams connect their game to the ways in which scientists conduct their research and to some of the science behind their mission.
In “Dark Matter Disaster,” a small primordial black hole has sent a large chunk of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. Teams use their puzzle-solving skills and notional quantum sensing techniques to precisely measure the rogue asteroid. With that information in hand, they use quantum computing to reveal the chunks’ internal structure. Successful teams explode the asteroid perfectly so that it doesn’t collide with Earth.
“There are a lot more interconnected pieces in this mission, and the room’s flow is really nice,” said John Benson, a physics major who helped design this iteration of LabEscape and will join Professor Paul Kwiat’s lab as a graduate student in the fall.
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Those pieces are informed by real science. The LabEscape production team quizzed Illinois Physics Professor Jessie Shelton and other experts around the country on the black hole science. The (fictional) quantum sensor that teams work with, meanwhile, shares characteristics with a (real-world) experiment that Kwiat’s research team recently completed that is capable of measuring the arrival times of a pair of racing photons down to the attosecond (10-18 of a second). And the type of inverse problem that allows researchers to extrapolate an object’s structure based on indirect measurements would indeed be well-suited to a future quantum computer.
“We had to pivot the storyline during development in order to match the science,” Kwiat said. “We want to be as true to life as possible. More importantly, we want people to experience firsthand the joy of scientific discovery, the value of collaborative efforts to solve challenging problems, and the relevance of science in our lives. And of course to have a blast while saving the planet!”