FLUTO
Fluto is a colossal electronic wind instrument. With Fluto, you can conduct a visual symphony with friends blowing into your phone. Our idea was to create an interactive installation piece that would engage people of all different nationalities and ages prompt them to enjoy the experience together with others.
About Fluto
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Fluto was created by a team including myself, Yu-Hao Ko, Meicheng Jia, Rebecca Skurnik for our interactive Pop-Up Windows Display class at ITP (aka “Popup Windows” taught by Gabe Barcia-Colombo).
Our idea was to create an interactive installation piece that would engage people of all different nationalities and ages and prompt them to enjoy the experience together with others.
Since the window installation, we have showed Fluto in the ITP Winter Show 2018, and NYCxDESIGN in May 2019, and plan to display it at other events, festivals, and exhibitions. You can visit flutopopup.com to learn more.
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Idea
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Our idea was to create an interactive installation piece that would engage people of all different nationalities and ages and prompt them to enjoy the experience together with others. We decided on an full-size “flute-like” instrument where people can play together by visiting fluto.us on their mobile devices, then choose a color (that corresponds to the same color tube as the instrument), and gently blow into their phone’s microphone to see the ball inside the chosen colored tube flow to the top of the tube. In addition, when chosen, each tube plays a different sound. With Fluto, people can use their breath and their mobile devices together as a tool for creating an audio-visual symphony. The video below documents our Fluto journey beginning from the ideation stage.
Inspiration
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We wanted to create a window display design that was simple and beautiful. The color scheme and lighting we agreed on were pastels. We decided to design two window displays that were connected, as shown in the photo of the Hermes window below. In addition, we liked the idea of fans inside the window as shown in photo of the Nike window display.
Fabrication Process
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Once we had an idea of what we wanted to create, we then decided on a simple and unique user interaction. We discovered that we were able to use the microphone on mobile devices as an input for our window installation. Since we wanted fans inside our windows, we thought that the interaction of blowing into mobile devices via the microphone would be a perfect input/output match, and that blowing harder would trigger the fans to turn faster.
Fluto was created over the course of 10 weeks, with a lot of hard work and dedication from the team. Here is a summary of the creation process:
Coding Fluto
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Check out the project GitHub for all of the code we use for the project.
Technology used:
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Heroku
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socket.io
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p5, including the p5 serial control library
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arduino
We created our web app (www.fluto.us – designed for use on mobile devices) using Heroku. The app uses the phone’s microphone volume to determine if the user is blowing in to the device.
From there, we used socket.io to send this information to the physical devices. Using socket.io allowed us to have multiple user interact with the exhibit at once. Whenever a user taps on a color and blows into their microphone, the web app sends a socket message to the computers managing the physical structure.
We used a Mac Mini to control 5 tube each. Each mac mini was connected to a hidden page on the web app and connected to an Arduino Mega via USB.
When data from users comes in from a socket, the information is translated into codified information that the Arduino can understand via serial communication. We used the p5 serial control library to set this up. If you are curious about this, ITPs serial communication lab is the place to start!
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Building Fluto
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We built Fluto around the 10 pre-fabricated acrylic tubes you see – the base was built with a lot of great planning and design💡
We used a CNC to make a base that holds the tubes, cutting a groove to hold the tubes in the bottom later, and a slot to fit the whole tube in the top.
Prototyping and Production - Gallery
Fluto on display at a public window (NYU Kimmel Centre):