The bulk of ambient display work has focused on ambient displays as peripheral, rather than focal, sources of information. Moving information off the computer screen, ambient displays have often gone hand in hand with tangible interfaces.

We wish to move beyond the dichotomy of peripheral and focal, a metaphor based on foveal vision. Rather than display information to be consumed by the eyes and the brain, we are interested in supporting a different kind of knowledge, embedded socially and physically in one’s environment.

We build ambient displays in space. We understand space to be produced by embodied social actors. To quote Doreen Massey, we think of places as “articulate moments in networks of social relations and understandings”, and as such they are processes rather than things. We mean our systems to be part of the process of place.

We build systems that:

• Articulate social action in space, not only by individuals, but aggregating action in a way that highlights the community.
• Are open to interpretation.
• Are known over time and by moving around the space.
• Are understood by observing each other’s actions both directly and through the system.

Projects

Nimio [Johanna Brewer, Amanda Williams]

Nimio is a system comprised of a series of physical objects designed as individual playthings, but wirelessly networked via RF to act as both input and output devices for a collective visualization of distributed activity. These hand-held, translucent silicone toys have embedded sensors (for input) and 3 colors of LEDs (for output) which allow them to be reactive to both sound and touch. Action around one of the Nimios will cause the others to glow in different patterns and colors. The interaction design is deliberately open-ended, in order to allow the emergence of distinctive patterns of collaborative engagement in real groups. 

We designed and built Nimio for a group of ten people who manage a multi-disciplinary information technology research institute. They reside in two spacious suites across the hall from each other and so, while they are in relative proximity, they are often out of ear-shot or sight of one another.

Public Awareness [Shadi Shariat] 

The goal of this project is to investigate and explore possibilities in new technologies that give rise to public awareness. It is focused on public places as its space of experiment and media communication as its medium of raising awareness. With computing becoming more pervasive, moving off the desktops to spaces, and the internet becoming a major outlet for media news, my aim is to investigate and explore ways in which these two phenomena can be utilized in creating some form of public awareness. I will focus on the promises of these two to find ways in raising public awareness in communities, which are less exposed to technological advances. My main motivations for this thesis are:

1.Exploring ways in raising public awareness by creating a more effective outlet for alternative and independent media using computing technologies.

2.Investigating ways in which interaction both amongst human and between human and computer changes and finds new meaning in an augmented space.

3.Exploring ways in which audio and sound can be used as perceptional cues to facilitate interaction between humans and computers.

Conceptual:

This project is an investigation of how accidental conversations that take place in public spaces can be used to trigger displaying of alternative/independent news in the form of text, audio and image on ambient displays in community spaces to raise public awareness. The goal use everyday conversations as cues for displaying animated news, that are not accessible through conventional/corporate media sources, in an engaging way based on the energy (pitch) of the speakers’ voices. For convenience, I pick a café as the test case for community space.

Technical:

The embedded microphones in each table will pick up bits and pieces of conversations in form of audio. The audio data will be turned into MIDI by using speech feature extraction of MAX/MSP. NaturallySpeaking (NS), the speech recognition software from Dragon Inc., will emit partially-recognized speech as text. The text that was picked up will be run through an online database search of daily news from independent and unbiased news outlets and the corresponding news text including the original word, relevant image and audio, if available, will be returned. All these information get stored in a file. A computer program will extract the original word automatically and periodically from NS along with the MIDI data from MAX/MSP and will send these to a text-animation program that will output information in the form of ‘vga’, projected into the space. The MIDI data is used as a hint for the text-animation program to display the information based on the pitch and intensity of the words spoken.

Temporality and rhythms [Judy Chen]

John Archibald Wheeler once joked, “Time is what stops everything from happening at once.” Just as temporality is central to our experience of the world, it is also central to collaboration and our interactions with others. People are creatures of habit. Every day, we arrive at work in the morning by a certain time, take our lunch break at the same hour, and go home at roughly the same time in the evening. While many people are aware of this basic daily temporal pattern, they may not be aware of other temporal regularities that often occur in their day-to-day lives, patterns that occur on both a larger scale over a long period of time and micro-patterns that occur within a day.

When we interact with other people, much of our interaction is built around the convergence of each other’s rhythms. We would like to explore this interaction further. Specifically, we are investigating temporal patterns in the context of being online and using instant messaging programs. How does the knowledge of someone’s IM rhythms affect the way you interact, coordinate, and collaborate with that person? What is the effect of this awareness on communication effectiveness?

Our system calculates the probability that your instant messaging buddies will be online at a specific time of day, based on their past behavior, and displays it as a graph over a time axis. We also introduce an element of comparison by allowing these graphs to layer upon themselves to form a larger image so you can see your own contribution within a larger group. We hope to study these patterns and explore how they might change over time, and in turn, how people might change their own rhythms with respect to others.

HotSpot Clocks [Amanda Williams]

The HotSpot Clocks project explores repetition across space and time in ambient displays.

The first aspect we consider about ambient information is its immediacy. The sound of rainfall also means that it is raining right now, but rainfall is a recurring phenomenon. The green tracks of raindrops on bronze statues, the width of a tree’s growth rings, or the stains of high water on a river’s levees may tell you something about the frequency or intensity of past rainfalls. Immediate information is useful, but so is knowledge of the history and patterns of a situated, repeating phenomenon.

Secondly, in the course of designing Nimio, we have noticed a corollary to situated displays. In many environments “situations” may tend to repeat themselves. Thus we see many offices in an office building, each with similar layouts and serving similar purposes. During our site study for Nimio, interviewees made a point of telling us how closely they worked together, and it is notable that they like to present themselves as a close-knit group.  At our first visit on site, most group members had jasmine blossoms in their offices.  We were told later that they were all from the same bush. While one of these jasmine branches may constitute a mere pretty office decoration, the set of them, distributed throughout many coworkers’ offices, conveys information about the working relationships of this group. Nimio was meant to constitute a similar sort of display.

Similarly, in a city we find many traffic signals at many intersections, many schedules at many bus stops, many labeled drains and manholes. In such environments, situated displays may also become distributed displays. In an urban environment, infrastructural access points can easily be read as distributed displays. Parking signs are access points to a legal infrastructure regulating parking in the city. Manhole covers typically fade into the background, a generally unnoticeable part of the urban landscape (unless the covers are removed and the hole revealed); however, a closer look reveals care in labeling. The distribution of manhole covers can be used to discern the routing of water, sewerage and electric infrastructures.

Information and computational technologies add layers of invisible infrastructure on top of familiar electrical and communicative networks. WiFi coverage, for example, is not directly visible (though the savvy geek will look for gatherings of like-minded people with their laptops out). The HotSpot Clock attempts to render visible not only the presence of a nearby wireless access point, but the current amount of activity on it, and the long-term temporal patterns of use of that access point. In an office building containing several access points, it can provide spatially distributed information concerning activity in different portions of the building, providing clues to human activity based on wireless internet activity.

SignalPlay [Amanda Williams, Eric Kabisch]

When computation moves off the desktop, how will it transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy? How will people encounter and understand these spaces, and how will they interact with each other through the augmented capabilities of such spaces? We have been exploring these questions through a prototype system in which augmented objects are used to control a complex audio 'soundscape.' The system involves a range of objects distributed through a space, supporting simultaneous use by many participants. We have deployed this system at a number of settings in which groups of people have explored it collaboratively. Our initial explorations of the use of this system reveal a number of important considerations for how we design for the interrelationships between people, objects, and spaces.

SignalPlay is a sensor-based interactive sound environment in which familiar objects encourage exploration and discovery of sound interfaces through the process of play. Embedded wireless sensors form a network that detects gestural motion as well as environmental factors such as light and magnetic field. Human interactions with the sensors and with each other cause both immediate and systemic changes in a spatialized soundscape. Our investigation highlights the interplay between expected object-behavior associations and new modes of interaction with everyday objects.