Meet AirGlow
The AirGlow is a musical instrument and learning tool that synthesizes music, lights, and motion into one experience.
Introducing the world’s first STEMstrument™! AirGlow looks like something from the future and completely 3D printed. The 200mm fingerboard is both fretless and fretted! The position-pressure strip is covered in silicone and teflon and is capable of fully gliding the finger along its length, but ribs curved under the bottom gently inform the hand where it is accurately at all times. The design is informed by the common air-guitar performance practice for accessibility, and a long handle at one end invites swinging the instrument like a lightsaber. The light bar can both be used as a visualizer for sound or other data, or make use of included apps to make your own light patterns and sounds! A lanyard clip for a neck or wrist strap can be attached.
Play Now, Pay Later: We offer an option at checkout to divide your purchase into 4 installments over 6 months with 0% interest. We’re making AirGlows as fast as we can! Thank you all for your support. Please order yours today and we’ll ship it as soon as possible.
We use FDM 3D printing to translate shapes from the imagination into real physical objects by compositing one layer of plastic over another. There is a unique quality to 3D printed parts that is different from typical injection molded plastic.
What do you get when a light saber and ukulele have a baby?
The AirGlow gets its name from an air-guitar strum sensor and an LED light bar. It also has motion sensors, and a fingerboard sensitive to pressure and position. It makes use of a performance practice most people already know how to emulate - playing the air guitar. These gestures, when performed through the AirGlow, are translated into an application with many instrumental presets for plug-and-play capability. Included tutorials and stepwise guides teach basic computational thinking to enable people to customize their AirGlow instrument in MaxMSP. MIDI, DMX, and OSC options enable control for almost any software or hardware on stage.
Drag and Drop Software
The Optron Mini App lets you connect the Optron to your computer over USB. You may use the sounds that already exist on your computer or download new ones to give the Optron unique tones of your choice!
“Light Boxes” let you generate cool patterns and effects.
Pre-made performance patches and effects get you making sounds and light effects quickly.
Become an AirGlow Master by walking through the provided tutorial of “Techolettes” - templates that break down each feature and capability.
Make customized creations, perform, and share!
Pre-made patches and settings are available free of charge! To save customized creations, a subscription to Cycling’74 is required.
At Home (ahem…the Office)
In the hands of a kid or an adult, AirGlow will keep you plugged in for hours as you explore the light and sound features. Hours of curated activities will enable you to transform your Optron into an experience no other instrument in the world can express.
In addition to a powerful color LED strip, the AirGlow features tilt and motion sensing, finger pressure and position, 2 degrees of air guitar hand tracking. AirGlow connects to a computer USB port (cable included) to interact with educational, music, and visual applications.
STE[A]M Education
AirGlow Teaches computational thinking, sensor technology, musicianship, and design. We’re actively partnering with regional secondary school STEM teachers to produce standards-focused (NGSS and others) approaches to fulfilling 21st Century Skills.
3 Modes
The AirGlow body’s agronomic design can be held and played in multiple ways:
Guitar Mode
Blaster Mode
Lightsaber Mode
Make Dope Beats, Make a Difference
Every AirGlow purchase helps us to provide AirGlows at-cost for underrepresented students in STEM.
Want to build your own?
The Optron AirGlow is an open source project released under the GNU Public License:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 . < Click to read terms
This license lets you remix, adapt, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit Stratos Instruments LLC and license your new creations under the identical terms. If you would like to create your own please find the list of parts here and the build guide here!
Once you have the instrument instructions for installing the software may be found here!
Get Started
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Are you a STEM Educator?
Tell us how you want to use the AirGLow in your classroom, after school program, or club.