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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.
You'll need:
Here's how you do it:
First, connect each of the rheostats to a voltmeter. Apply current and test the system to ensure that all the hardware is working properly. Then, take the USB cable and fashion one end of it into a crude snare trap. Hide this snare trap under leaves and grass clippings in the middle of your yard; hold onto the other end of USB cable and lie in wait behind a bush. When the damn kid runs across your lawn and onto the snare trap, tug hard on your end of the USB cable. This will trap the child about the ankle. Tie the free end of the USB to a securely anchored object near your comuter. Have the kid constantly surf the web, checking for information that is interesting to you; when something changes, tell him to twiddle the rheostats or something. When the novelty wears off three hours later, tell the kid to stay off your goddamn lawn from now on and let him go. Throw voltmeters and rheostats in trash. Hang self with USB cable.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
my boss changes color to display information at a glance.
the one monitoring their web traffic just exploded.
But if you had one for everything, wouldn't you just be surrounded by a lot of (eventually) confusing colors? I still prefer a single device with a sensible display. Sure, this looks fun, but after the novelty wears off I think it'll be not only annoying but inexcusably inaccurate.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Of course.. we live in an analog world.. we'll never be able to take things in digitally because we don't work digitally. Even your computer needs to be able to display in analog (speakers/monitor) before you can figure anything out. We can't do anything in digital... :)
I've got a watch that does this. Mickey's hands move with the passage of time - the big hand sweeps in a circle over the course of an hour. The little hand goes around the circle twice a day. It's great at letting me know about what time it is! Only $299, postpaid.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
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 digital version of this! Let's see... right now it says "Outlook not so good." Now it says, "Try again later."
Wow! High tech stuff!!!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
1- Number of support calls answered today
2- How much money earned today
3- Depressing ratio between the two
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
I don't need a colorful orb to tell me the pollen count in my area.
My hay fever nose does just fine. Like clockwork.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
It's a single pixel monitor for crying out load!
What the hell are people thinking?
If you really want that functionality, just plug in a monitor using a second cheapo vidcard. Much more expandable...
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/
Can it be configured to flash bright red when GPS data shows that your wife is about to bust you with another woman?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Moments after seeing flashing red and blue lights in my rear-view window with a pound of a sticky, green, and illicit herb in my trunk, my seat turned a deep shade of brown.
The analog olfactory indicators were an added bonus.
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
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.
So let me get this straight...
We use some type of fancy sensor to convert a real world analog signal to digital information, then we convert the digital information back to analog to humans can understand it intuitively?
You pretty much described every electronice device in the world that has a user interface.
Finkployd
Slashdot Karma.
Mod parent up!
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?
It's listed as the Ambient EXECTUTIVE Dashboard. Executive - no need to be sensible or accurate.
The previous color changing ones were a little too simple and tended to hypnotize the executives. Have you seen the Executive toys at most office stores? I don't think Novelty wears off for those folks.
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.
5: How does the Ambient Device get information?
Via a nationwide wireless network called the Ambient Information Network. It works in a similar way to cell phones and receivers.
Translation:
There's a pager receiver inside. We send out national pages every few minutes which essentially contain packets of information on each of the possible displays.
It's still an innovative use of a nearly obsolete network. However, they can't gurantee free service for life though. When they go out of business, your nifty device is nothing unless you hack a computer interface into it, or get a pager account and find a way to attach the receiver into that account.
But it makes me smile to hear them say they have a network all for themselves - giving the impression that they own or control the network their messages are sent over.
-Adam
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.
I know nothing about tcp/ip, but my electronics and basic are pretty good...
I know nothing about electronics or class, but my tcp/ip is pretty good --
but my own link is the best way to sum up how I wasted my Christmas bonus. After dropping wish.sourceforge.net and a fig newton firecracker x10 adapter, I can safely say my analog solution to digital alerts is as wasteful as I could muster this winter.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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
..Believe me...I should know.
Anyway, Color-reactivity has been around for ages. Even within the scope of involving computers in one form or another.. There are two examples that i'm aware of, both were implemented w/ early 60's technology:
1) I wish I could remember the name. It was basically a computer-controlled art exhibit. They set aside a room in an art gallery with an old IBM 704, rigged the room up with motion sensors and microphones, and used the input levels to drive color wheels and light projectors... So if the gallery was quiet, the walls and all the stuff hanging from the ceiling would turn deep blue and move slowly. If there were alot of people visiting the gallery, the color of the room would turn more pink and yellow. If there was alot of chatter going on inside the gallery, with people talking to eachother, the more psychedelic the room became.
2) There used to be a device back in the early-mid 60's called an Audiovox, if i'm not mistaken...The Audiovox was just a simple amplifier with three colored lights on the front.... Red, Yellow,and Green. It was used to help deaf children learn how to modulate their speech, based upon the feedback the lights produced.... If the lights flickered red, the user would know that their pronunciation was way off. By trying to make (and keep) the green light as solid as possible, deaf children could refine their speech without necessarrily knowing what it sounded like. Neat stuff..
Anyway. Not a new idea. Not even when I had written about it.
Bowie J. Poag
A speaker cone, and its effect on the air pressure, is not quantized, but rather analogue plus random, the random components coming from amplifier noise and Brownian motion of the air it is driving.
The movement of hairs in the ear is also mostly analogue. Older Slashdotters may remember analogue frequency meters, which had an array of tuned reeds covering a fairly narrow band around the power frerquency of 50, 60 or 400Hz, and by looking at the white painted ends you could see a crude spectrum display. The reeds might be tuned in steps of 0.25 Hz, but the eye would pick out the curve and interpolate its peak to less than that. The ear mechanism is similar, there are many overlapping tuned filters, but the amplitude detection is at least semi-analogue.
The real world only becomes digital when you get down to doing things like counting photons, for example in astronomy using an image intensifier in front of a CCD, but even there the distribution in both time and frequency/energy of these photons is thermodynamic or if you prefer, statistical.
Many digital designs fail or are troublesome because the whizz-kids who think they know VHDL and can drive a toolset, forget about ANALOGUE things like transmission line effects on the PCB, or statistical things like timing jitter, which is ultimately caused by amplitude noise, a statistical thing, being summed with a signal of finite slew rate.
It is DIGITAL systems which are unable to make a sufficiently exact representation of the real world, for example 16 bit encoding is woefully inadequate for high quality audio.
Energy also comes in any quantity we like, the physical velocity of hot gas, for example, contains a random element, but because of partial ionisation its summation is not limited to the sum of permissible quantum states of individual atoms, which of course would be quantised.
So, it is a noisy analogue world, and digits superimposed thereon are simply discrete groups of noisy analogue levels. If you don't believe that statement, look at a PCI bus on a good analogue oscilloscope!
If you want to see something else which in theory should be digital, and therefore precise, exact and consistent, look at the trash software products of the Convicted Monopolist. Here the statistical component is indirect, caused by numerous semi-random human contributions at the design and coding stages, and a large degree of something which is neither analogue nor digital, nor even statistical, neither is it a variable (because its purpose is truly deterministic/monoploistic), nor a constant (because it produces output which is truly random insofar as it is totally uncorrelated with anything else), but is in fact the product of pure greed (a quasi-digital quantity, usually approximate by 1), pure arrogance(a dimensionless variable approaching infinity) and total incompetence (a dimensionless variable approaching zero). I will call this new property of matter Billness.