Ambient Displays

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Ambient Displays
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Introduction

• Ambient?????
• Sounds of rain, feeling of warm wind
• gt understand and enjoy the weather even as we
  engage in other activities.
• open door, lights
• gt activities of other people

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Current personal computing interfaces

• Digital information
• painted bits on flat screens
• foreground
• GUI

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Ambient Displays

• entire physical environment as an interface to
  digital information.
• information is moved off the screen into the
  physical environment
• aware of people or general states of large systems

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Ambient Displays (cont.)

• feel connected to others, especially loved ones
• highly specialized environments where many
  streams of information need to be constantly
  monitored
• aviation cockpit, atomic power plant control
  room, car

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Related Work

• Tangible Bits
• Awareness in Human Computer Interaction
• Awareness is the state of knowing about the
  environment in which you exist
• Awareness is essential in collaboration to
  coordinate the activities in a shared workspace.
• peoples activities verse dynamic information
• Cognitive Science Theories

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ambientROOM

• putting the user inside the computer
• Human Activity Awareness
• persistent, yet non-intrusive connection between
  loved ones
• Water Ripples
• Active Wallpaper
• Ambient Sound

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ambientROOM (cont.)

• Global System Awareness
• monitor large systems, behaviors
• Ex trends of stock values, network traffic
• natural phenomena,
• Ex atmospheric, astronomical
• Controls
• Bottles containers for digital content
• clock with exposed hands ???
• self-explanatory

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Ambient Fixtures

• The Water Lamp
• changing information gt changing patterns of
  light
• Pinwheels
• visual representation of airflow
• spin at different speeds based upon their input
  information source

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Mapping of information sources

• modality
• present a source of information
• considered with foreground task
• Visually task gt auditory display
• Talking on the phone gt shadows on a wall
• mapping of data from information source to
  ambient display
• 010101 gt ambient display
• abstract and literal displays

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Thresholds / Transition from Background to
Foreground

• Thresholds background to foreground transition
• Busy ambientROOM gt lower threshold gtinformation
  overload
• Learning effect
• perception changes based on his or her familiarity