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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.
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... :)
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.
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
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/
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.
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
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
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
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