New device from Ambient Devices - the Ambient Umbrella
Brad Feld recently reported a new device from Ambient Devices - the Ambient Umbrella. Like Brad, I love ambient devices - I was one of the first to buy the original Orb back in 2003. In fact, I wrote about it in my book the same year:
We are starting to see the possibilities of wireless “ambient” devices (desktop orbs, wristwatches, even walls), which provide a potent mixture of peripheral awareness and visual prompting. These devices use the physical environment as an interface to digital information (for example, rendering changes in information as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light).
John Seely Brown gives the example of a fountain at Xerox that was programmed to bubble at a speed determined by the Xerox stock price. This is a way to use the subconscious to provide awareness of conditions. Employees could know what was going on in the market simply by being aware of the speed at which the fountain was bubbling (not necessarily a good thing in the case of Xerox in the last few years!). High speed meant the stock price was going up, slow speed meant it was going down.
I am kind of surprised ambient objects didn’t take off sooner. But according to Brad:
I know of a bunch of different companies that are working on integrating the Internet with a wide variety of every day products. Some of the applications are simple while some are complex – many of them will radically change the way we interact with our “computers.”
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