Personal Dashboard from Ambient Devices

Clearly we are able to acquire and process spoken language without any foreground consciousness. Somewhere in our brain, sound is being converted into language and monitored for relevant information content. We are not paying attention to the myriad of conversations in the crowd, yet when information pertains to us, we immediately become alert.

Our brains have evolved to monitor several streams of background information without any foreground cognitive loading. Furthermore, our brains bring this information to our foreground consciousness when we discern it to be relevant within a given context - multitasking without conscious effort.

High tech is not necessarily better

When automotive manufacturers first began fitting digital dashboards to cars, they quickly found that a digital numerical display was not as good at conveying speed to the driver as the analogue dial, with its sweeping needle, particularly when all the driver had time for was a quick glance ... and that's just the most fundamental of information display problems.

There is no greater indication of the potential of a marketplace than to know Microsoft is invested heavily in it. Microsoft is developing "smart objects" to help us more appropriately incorporate the sea of information into our lives, and there are a host of other companies working in the area and one which is producing some remarkably useful smart objects is Ambient Devices.

Ambient Devices (the company)

Ambient Devices regards itself as the foremost exponent of this new science of glanceable information displays. Ambient's vision is to embed information representation into everyday objects such as lamps, pens, watches, walls, and wearables so the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered in subtle changes in form, movement sound, colour or light.

Ambient already has two devices on the market and previewed a third at CES.

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