Ambient Atoms: a Device for Ambient Information Visualization

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an explosion of available information. This explosion concerns public as well as private information. From an individual perspective, the explosion is largely materialized by the computer system that we constantly have with us, namely the smartphone. The smartphone provides immediate access to a wealth of information and a multitude of data. All these various data are often delivered to the user by means of the same single output module ie. the screen (and episodically the sound or vibrations) of the smartphone. The smartphone is an easy way to get access to many different data, but this is not always the most practical solution for each category of information, nor in all circumstances. Ambient devices can be an answer to some situations for which the smartphone is not convenient enough to get access to the required information. Ambient displays deliver effortless, instant access to information at a glance. This paper introduces the Ambient Atoms, a new ambient visualization device. The Ambient Atoms is a cheep and flexible connected object that looks like a frame on which information is symbolically visualized. An application for the visualization of data relative to an apartment is proposed as a sample application.