Airo
For the physical computing couse, we were asked to redesign the traditional radios and come up with some innovative functionalities around it. The major focus of the problem statement was about delivering a smooth and efficient tangible experience.
What if, there is a way to break the filter bubble, to embrace diverse conceptions, and to discover through serendipity. The team envision a future in which the Internet, just as its earliest vision, can help us come across new ideas and possibilities by creating Airo. Airo is a personal, yet not personalized radio. Airo empowers individuals to get aware of the filter bubble and take control over it through promoting exposure to diverse perspectives. Using physical computing, it challenges the filter bubble phenomenon and presents an alternative way of experiencing social media.
Created with Arduino and Processing, Airo connects to Twitter’s API. It fetches real-time tweets and transfer them into audio through text-to-speech technology. The fan, a metaphor of span, connects to Arduino through an encoder. By expanding it, the geographical range of the tweets gets increased. In this way, you are expanding your horizon by hearing more about what is happening not only relevant to you, but also around the wider world. The potentiometer-embedded knob allows you to choose different categories, by fetching tweets with different hashtags, namely news, music, and technology.
