Airo is a personal, yet not personalized radio. It challenges the filter bubble phenomenon and explores an alternative way of experiencing social media.

It reads out tweets for you. When expanding the fan, you are also expanding your horizon by hearing more about what is happening not only relevant to you, but also around the wider world.

Design Team

Team: Sindhu Mandari, Surojit Dey, Varenya Raj, Yuxi Liu

Mentors: Dario Buzzini, Ubi di Feo

The Internet has provided a rich information environment to our society. Yet more and more, the Internet has become a one-way mirror, increasingly reflecting our own interests. Filter bubbles are fundamentally altering the way we encounter information, amplifying our desire and bias.

What if there is a way to break the filter bubble, to embrace diverse conceptions, and to discover through serendipity.

Airois is a personal, yet not personalized radio. It empowers individuals to get aware of the filter bubble and take control over it through promoting exposure to diverse perspectives.

Created with Arduino and Processing, Airo connects to Twitter's API. It fetches real-time tweets and transfers 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. The potentiometer-embedded knob allows you to choose different categories, by fetching tweets with different hashtags.

By creating Airo, we envision a future in which the Internet, just as its earliest vision, can help us come across new ideas and possibilities.

Learn More About This Projectx