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Analog Approach to Displaying Data
Lurker McLurker writes "
BBC News reports that
Ambient Devices, the MIT Media Lab spin-off which brought us the
Ambient Orb, have developed a new product, the Ambient Dashboard .
The orb changed colour to display information at a glance, for example turning red if the stock market is going down. The dashboard has three displays, similar to speedometers or barometers, to show the information of your choice, from stock market volumes to the pollen count." As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.
The research group I work with here - Information Interfaces Research Group - at Georgia Tech works on something quite similar.
:)
:)
Its called the InfoCanvas - kinda cool stuff
And yes, although its not analog per-se (as in, display-meters and the like), it does show you in gradual gradings. Like the sky-color changing from a hue of blue to red, and the rainbow slowly fading away and the like.
Just thought it might be relevant!
Vote for a Man, Vote for Bush!
Not a liberatarian flipflop hippie.
i have a device commected to my computer which has ~2million indicators of colour, such a device could be used to show the state of every item on every stock market the world over, several times over
this could actually be a useful case mod.
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Sounds a lot like the weather ball that glowed from a tower in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. in the 60's-80's (and now back up, elsewhere in the city). Pretty intuitive, and just in case you didn't get it, there's a bit of verse to explain it: "Weather ball red, warmer weather ahead / Weather ball blue, colder weather in view / Weather ball green, no change foreseen / Color blinking bright, rain or snow in sight." Same old concept, just a different device.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
My boss has always wanted "bandwidth VU meters" to spotcheck resource usage here. Any suggestions? (Other than Google?)
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Actually, I have the coolest CPU load display. It's made with one of these "charge left" check display that comes with some AA battery (you know, you press two poles and it turns yellow). Here's the recipe:
// port's line.
- Get a used battery with a level check gage
- Carefully unwind the wrapper, and cut it to size to recover the gage
- Duct-tape thin electrical wires at the two ends, behind the wrapper. It's tricky to get good contact. Unfortunately, it's not possible to solder then.
- Glue the wire-equipped gage against something : this is important, the display method in the case of these AA batt checkers is thermal ink. If you want it to display something more useful than just "full on" all the time after 5 minutes, you need to glue it on something that sinks the heat from behind.
- Make a small TTL-controlled 1.5V power supply and connect the control line to one of your
- Make a small program to control the display by sending a continuous square signal with variable width modulation (variable duty cycle). Wiggling the line only several times per second is okay, the thermal inertia of the display is high enough that any timing will work. It takes a while to calibrate it, as it's not linear.
Mine's glued on the side of my monitor. At a glance, I can see the average CPU load. It's the display itself that does the averaging, due to thermal inertia. I left the wires exposed and the "Duracell" part of the wrapper to increase the geeky looks.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seems to be the trend these days..
Anyways, looks pretty cool. There's just something about analog gauges that's so asthetically pleasing. Like someone mentioned before in the post about analog watches still being used, It's probably that an analog gauge is highly visual, whereas digital is more of numeric processing. Would anyone rather have a digital tach in their car than an analog one? I know I wouldn't.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
System load could be signified by clicks, with the frequency of the clicks increasing as system load increases.
Each new TCP connection would make some kind of "boing" sound, with the frequency again depending on what service I'm connecting to (http would go boioioioing, ssh would go beeeerooooing, etc)
Memory usage would be signified by a double-beep, "beeee-beep," with the "duty cycle" indicating the percentage of memory usage. Two short beeps means lots of memory is free. One long "beeeep" means I'm swapping to disk.
Disk seek activity would be a series of random bleeping sounds, like Brownian motion across frequencies.
Basically, I would like an irritating cacophony of sound to emanate from my workstation, which only I can interpret :-)
- Red = Warmer
- White = Colder
- Green = No Change
- Blinking = Precipitation coming
It was simple, but it worked.A history of the Weatherball
I haven't been by that area for years, so I don't know if the Weatherballs are still there or not. Bueller?
I know nothing about tcp/ip, but my electronics and basic are pretty good...
You'll need
3 analog dials
3 triacs
a parrelel port.
i'll just provide a link with some pertanent info. Basically wire up the triacs to the voltmeters (to isolate and backflow current from the VU meter's coils) and the other end to any data line on the parrellel port. Strobe the data line till your VU meters needle is pointing where you want it to go.
see http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm
h .htm
This seems similar to Calm Technology research done at Xerox PARC. The research was/is about "engaging both the center and the periphery of our attention and moving back and forth between the two. Ordinarily when driving our attention is centered on the road, the radio, our passenger, but not the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we were attuned to the noise in the periphery, and could come quickly to attend to it."
They designed a Dangling String to "visualise" network traffic:
"Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the "Dangling String".
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology."
from Designing Calm Technology by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC, December 21, 1995
http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtec
Sorry, I'm just reminiscing about the old days when I had a micro with some of the address lines insufficiently isolated from the speaker so I could actually hear how busy the CPU was. Just a low level hum but enough to signal when your code was caught in a loop and far more informative that a CPU meter because in a crude way you could actually hear the structure of the kinds of loops being executed. Maybe I should write something like this myself but I'm not sure how to poll the state of the PC register, say, under any modern OS. Each process could have a sound channel - proportional in volume to the CPU time it's using - and I'd be instantly alerted any time something weird was going on.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
the one monitoring their web traffic just exploded.
Actually that would be rather cool in the operations room. No longer would you need to use a screen to see that your site is dying ( well, to confirm it you would ). Just put it on your desk and work on something else.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
My development group at Shopping.com uses an Ambient Orb to reflect the status of the hourly build/test cycle. Even though the continuous build process sends out email and has a web page to indicate what the status is, it's still nice to have a physical artifact of the system, and certainly hammers home that The Build Must Keep Working. When you look at it and it's green, you feel just a little bit OK, and when it's red, you get a little anxious, and really want to make sure it gets fixed.
I only wish that the Orb was more responsive to the data we send it; occasionally it can take 20 minutes for it to update. But overall, we like it. Do not anger the Orb!
mahlen