Ambient device

Ambient devices are a new genre of consumer electronics characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called "glanceable"). Ambient devices utilize pre-attentive processing to display information: the ability for the brain to perceive information without any apparent cognitive load.^{[citation needed]}

The New York Times Magazine announced ambient devices as one of the Ideas of the Year in 2002 on the heels of a start-up company, Ambient Devices, releasing their first product Ambient Orb, a frosted-glass ball lamp which maps information to a linear color spectrum and displays the trend in the data. Other products in the ambient genre have since been produced, such as the wifi-enabled 2008 Chumby, and in October 2012 the more sophisticated, 52-LED device MooresCloud (a reference to Moore's Law) from Australia.

Initial research on ambient devices began at Xerox Parc with a paper co-written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown entitled Calm Computing. Associated fields include Ubiquitous computing (also known as Ubicomp) and Calm technology.

See also

• Information appliance

References

• Thompson, Clive (December 15, 2002). "The Year in Ideas; News That Glows". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-06-23. 
• Lyons, Daniel (March 24, 2008). "Chumby and the Ambient Web". Forbes. Retrieved 2008-06-23.