Fluxa Turns Body Movements Into a Social Display

Developed by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group, Fluxa is a wearable persistence of vision (POV) device that displays images using body movement.

Fluxa is made up of three parts: a programmable LED strip, a PCB consisting of an ATmega328 MCU, a 9DOF sensor, an EEPROM and a BLE board, as well as a 3D-printed case with Velcro so it can be attached to your clothing in various places.

The team envisions Fluxa as a “transient wearable display to foster richer self-expression and communication in daily life that can be used to enhance existing social gestures such as handwaving to get attention, as a communicative tool that displays the speed and distance covered by joggers, and as a decoration device that generates images around dancing bodies.”

Fluxa communicates with its accompanying app via Bluetooth, which enables the user to type in a message, choose different animation modes, and customize the color, brightness and display duration. Things that can be programmed range from emojis (bus, car, camera, smiley face, etc.), to scrolling text, to data as you jog or perform a drum solo.

The display can show both text and images. It consists of 16 rows (16 LEDs) by 21 columns, which displays a maximum of three letters of 7 columns each. We create different animation modes that can display the text and images in different ways. The information can be shown in the whole display (16 pixels/column) or scaled to a smaller size (8 pixels/column) with two lines of letters. We also have a scrolling animation that pushes text forward and backward, as well as a refresh animation with 10 sweeping movements each frame.

You can read all about Fluxa on its paper here, as well as see it in action below!