Ambient device
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Ambient devices are a type of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance, also known as "glanceable". Ambient devices use pre-attentive processing to display information and are aimed at minimizing mental effort. Associated fields include
ubiquitous computing Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using ...
and
calm technology Calm technology or calm design is a type of information technology where the interaction between the technology and its user is designed to occur in the user's periphery rather than constantly at the center of attention. Information from the techno ...
. The concept is closely related to the Internet of Things. ''
The New York Times Magazine ''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...
'' announced ambient devices as one of its Ideas of the Year in 2002. The award recognized a start-up company, Ambient Devices, whose first product Ambient Orb, was a frosted-glass ball lamp, which maps information to a linear color spectrum and displays the trend in the data. Other products in the genre include the 2008 Chumby, and the 2012 52- LED device MooresCloud (a reference to Moore's Law) from Australia. Research on ambient devices began at
Xerox Parc PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
, with a paper co-written by
Mark Weiser Mark D. Weiser (July 23, 1952 – April 27, 1999) was a computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Vall ...
and
John Seely Brown John Seely Brown (born 1940), also known as "JSB", is an American researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bend towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities. Brown served as Director of Xer ...
, entitled ''Calm Computing''.


Purpose

The purpose of ambient devices is to enable immediate and effortless access to information. The original developers of the idea state that an ambient device is designed to provide support to people carrying out everyday activities. Ambient devices decrease the effort needed to process incoming data, thus rendering individuals more productive. The key issue lies with taking Internet-based content (e.g. traffic congestion, weather condition, stock market quotes) and mapping it into a single, usually one-dimensional spectrum (e.g. angle, colour). According to Rose, this presents data to an end user seamlessly, with an insignificant amount of
cognitive load In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the amount of working memory resources used. There are three types of cognitive load: ''intrinsic'' cognitive load is the effort associated with a specific topic; ''extraneous'' cognitive load refe ...
.


History

The concept of ambient devices can be traced back to the early 2000s, when preliminary research was carried at Xerox PARC, according to the company’s official website. The
MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
website lists the venture as founded by David L. Rose, Ben Resner, Nabeel Hyatt and Pritesh Gandhi as a lab spin-off.


Examples

Ambient Orb was introduced by Ambient Devices in 2002. The device was a glowing sphere that displayed data through changes in color. Ambient Orb was customizable in terms of content and its subsequent visual representation. For instance, when the device was set to monitor a stock market index (e.g. NASDAQ), the Orb glowed green/red to represent the upward/downward price movements; alternatively, it turned amber when the index is unchanged. Nabeel Hyatt stated that the device was marketed as an interior design item with additional functionality. Another prominent ambient device is Chumby, released in 2008. It served as an at-a-glance widget station. Chumby was able to push relevant customizable data (weather, news, music, photos) to a touchscreen through Wi-Fi. It greatly surpassed the products resembling Ambient Orb, in terms of functionality, and was proclaimed one of the top gadgets of 2008, production ceased in April 2012. Since 1 July 2014 Chumby is available only as a paid subscription service. More recent products such as
Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio ...
can be seen as adopting the spirit of ambient devices, in that they operate in the background, responding to both users and external data sources.


See also

*
Information appliance An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as playing music, photography, or editing text. Typical examples are smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Inf ...


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References

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