Imagine having a translucent orb on your desk that changes colors with movements of the stock market or changes in weather in your home town. Imagine having a row of these orbs that change color with the rate of defects in the production lines across your plants or the productivity on key measures in your call centers, one for each location. These subtle changes then capture your attention in the middle of other tasks so you can act in a timely manner.
Well the future is here. Ambient Devices, a start-up based on research at MIT, has brought us a practical rendition of glanceable technology where physical devices undergo changes based on digital data fed to them through a pervasive low-cost wireless network.
On Tuesday, David Rose and Joey Fitts introduced me to this unique product at their office in the Center for Innovation near MIT. It seems likely that in a few years many ubiquitous physical objects in our environment may become intelligent conveyers of constantly changing, relevant information. We may see the changing availability of seats at restaurants, movie theaters, and commuter trains and/or stock levels of key items in stores. We may see when the next bus is coming, the status of traffic congestion, or visitors to a corporate web site.
Much research shows that we can simultaneously process information in complementary modalities, such as text and pictures, but receiving multiple information threads in the same modality becomes overload. For example, text-based instant messaging diverts our attention from text on our computer screen. An ambient, analog device can complement the text-based messages we increasing receive in our environment.
I would imagine that there may be many “killer apps” for this tool and various forms of business productivity measures and alerts will form a core of these applications. These devices offer an interesting outlet for knowledge sharing and potential new tools for knowledge management that can compliment traditional forms of communication. They give us new fuel for thinking about how we structure and convey knowledge. The BBC and USA Today have recent accounts that go into more detail on the possibilities.
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