Lorcan Coyle's Home on Tinterweb

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The rise of the Internet, the ever increasing ubiquity of data, and its low signal-to-noise ratio have contributed to the problem of information overload, whereby individuals have access to more data than they can assimilate into meaningful and actionable information. Much of the success of Web 2.0 has been achieved after an effective tackling of this problem. Ambient Information Systems take the battle into the physical world by integrating information into the physical environment tin a non-intimidating and non-overloading fashion. After two international workshops on Ambient Information Systems, we outline our vision for the field, consolidate a new definition, identify the key concerns of the research community, and issue a call to arms for future research.

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Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographical separate friends and colleagues. In this paper we report on Ambient Jewelry, which is a project exploring the intersection of individual and user generated customization with ambient presence displays. With this research we are seeking techniques that enable people to invent, discover and find new forms of ambient presence visualisations.

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It is becoming difficult to convey information from an ever-increasing number of digital sources to users in a condensed and meaningful way. This growth has particularly occurred with peripheral information sources. These are of general interest to users, but do no require or typically command constant focus or attention. Examples include weather, stock data, blogs, and calendars. Ambient Displays present information unobtrusively in an intelligent fashion using abstract visual cues and metaphors and have the possibility of acting as a complement to information filtering systems. We describe the implementation of an ambient display that contains elements representing time, weather, public transport departure times, and the proximity of friends. An initial impact study was undertaken and found a high sense of usefulness and curiosity in the finished application and in the field as a whole.

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Recent studies have shown that in distributed families keeping in touch is essential; this calls for technologies that can connect family members and bring them closer virtually. There are several social networking technologies online, but they are seldom designed for family connectedness and do not cater for the needs of computer-novice relatives. We present Near Dear, an application that brings online tools to an ambient display at home. The ambient display makes it easy for computer-novices to update and access online networking tools. We also conducted a user trial and evaluation of this system, which indicated that the developed system is convenient and intuitive.

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Project Summary

The Whereabouts Clock was a final year project undertaken by Christine Trant and under the supervision of Lorcan Coyle. This project attempts to display the locations of individuals in an unobtrusive display from sensed real-time location information. This deals with the issue of combining real-time data with unobtrusive displays; real-time data is concerned with privacy while adding real-time data to situated displays is still relatively new. The Whereabouts Clock originally implemented by Microsoft Research is a situated display to show the whereabouts of family or friends. The Whereabouts Clock is used to find the locations of people such as family members and display it in a way that is unobtrusive, similar to the way a clock displays the time. While Microsoft Research use cell towers to track mobile phones, this project used computers with machine IDs and visible wireless devices to track users. The result of this project has been the development of a novel implementation of a Whereabouts Clock to determine and display a user's location. To test the value of the Whereabouts Clock, a user study was carried out over a course of 5 days. The user study found that the Whereabouts Clock was well received and would be a useful application for friends and family.

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The concept of calm technology, introduced by Mark Weiser, has led researchers from several disciplines to explore new and unconventional ways of conveying information. Some well-known examples of such novel information techniques include Ambient Devices’ Stock Orb, Koert van Mensvoort's Datafountain, Violet's Nabaztag, Jafarinami et al.'s Breakaway, Mynatt et al.'s Audio Aura and Digital Family Portrait, Mankoff et al.'s Daylight Display and BusMobile, and Natalie Jeremijenko's Dangling String. Applications such as these, that publish information in a non-intrusive or calm manner are Ambient Information Systems.

The 1st International Workshop on the Design and Evaluation of Ambient Information Systems was held in Toronto, Canada, on May 13th 2007, in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing. The goal of this workshop was to bring researchers together to discuss this domain of growing interest in both pervasive computing and human-computer interaction. This domain is described by mechanisms that are minimally attended and perceivable from outside the range of a person's direct attention, providing pre-attentive processing without being overly distracting. Developing new technologies such as these poses new and difficult challenges. These technologies display information outside of a person's direct attention, which is a space that is not currently well understood, making it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. A great deal of care is required to design studies which accurately observe the effect of ambient devices, particularly since the test subjects are not meant to observe them directly. After all, how does one provide a subject with a device and say, "I want you to use this, but please do not think about it?" Our workshop sought to gather perspectives from researchers in the field on these and other problems. Eleven excellent submissions were accepted which describe works-in-progress, frameworks, taxonomies, methodologies, evaluation paradigms, and case studies, and are published here.

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