To me the most useful ambient output is one you don't need to look at.
Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you.
A gadget mounted in your helmet could click softly as your head turns past cardinal points. You wouldn't even notice, consciously, but you would always know what direction you were facing.
I much prefer this line of thought to the sheer noise of modern computing.
Screens that change as they load, notifications every second, layout shifts, animations that serve no purpose, and more. It's driving me nuts to be honest.
I think there really is a space for computing that just exists around us, and interacts with the environment in ways you don't have to actively look at. As a plus, you'll save cycles for what you actually want to compute if you don't have to draw everything on a screen on top of 2000 layers of abstraction.
This is a problem I have with a lot of modern technology, I feel like we risk losing touch with ourselves.
The example you give is exactly what I'm talking about: You already know which direction you're facing, if you take the time to learn how to notice your own internal information. You already have magnetic sensors in your head.
I've found that it's relatively easy to develop one's capabilities to be able to do things like: always know what time it is, always know where you are and your orientation, remember things, etc.
I think it would be a shame to replace human faculties with machines, like using a wheelchair even though your legs work fine and then after awhile your legs atrophy and are no longer fine, y'know? I worry that we are doing that to our brains.
Now that bluetooth is easy to put into a gadget, it would be easier to configure than would have been convenient just a few years back, where you would need USB or buttons or something.
It would have a magnetic sensor to sample 3D orientation now and again (maybe per second), an inertial-platform chip for lower-powered moment-to-moment tracking and dead reckoning, and power up a GPS once in a while to get absolute position, correct the compass heading, and rebase the inertial platform. It would have a distinguished click for when you face the next way point, or your campsite.
I am partial to the idea of weak electric shocks instead of audio. But that might be a harder sell. People usually talk about shaker motors, but that is a recipe for needing lots of battery. I would rather the whole system weigh less than an AA cell, and run for weeks on a charge or button cell.
About the fingernail magnets, I recall stories about people who implanted magnets in their fingertips. It struck me as kind of dumb, vs gluing, although maybe the more nerve endings would make them more sensitive. The description was that near AC motors and transformers they could feel a vibration, and could tell whether metals were ferrous by touch. I expect you could get a sense of how conductive metal is by wiggling the magnet near it.
I remember reading a while ago (5-10 years?) about someone implanting a tiny rare magnet in their fingertip. That seems to provide more sensitivity than attaching it to the nails, at the cost of, well, implanting a chunk of metal in your finger.
Another interesting story is a fellow (Danish, I believe?) who calls himself a cyborg because he was born (completely?) colorblind but attached an antenna to his head that allows him to hear a tone that changes depending on the color in front of him. At some point he began to hear these color-sounds in his dreams as well.
While hemoglobin in blood has magnetic properties there’s no evidence that it leads to anyone being able to feel magnetic fields. At least one study has shown evidence for humans sensing magnetic fields but the author's do not make a case for blood being the biophysical mechanism https://authors.library.caltech.edu/90480/. The earths magnetic field is very weak and the force felt on our blood is even weaker.
It’s still a debate how animals sense the earths magnetic field. However, all theories rely on special adaptions and not on the extremely weak magnetic properties of blood.
Looks like "Hidden" is missing from the post title..."
("Hidden Interfaces for Ambient Computing: Enabling Interaction in Everyday Materials through High-Brightness Visuals on Low-Cost Matrix Displays")
We have just barely exorcised our "demon-haunted world" and now we rush to make artificial demons (e.g. "Siri", "Alexa", or "Cortana", etc.)
I feel like people should watch "Demon Seed" and "Maximum Overdrive". Yeah they are just fictional horror movies, but I feel like we need to think about failure modes before we wire ourselves into this new "daemon-haunted" world irrevocably.
Ambient computing seems to mean that our kids will grow up in a kind of cartoon reality. I actually have a concern that people will have a hard time developing proper intuitions about the "real" world. (Like when little kids try to swipe on TVs. That's pretty innocent and even amusing.)
Personally, I really like this aesthetic. I'd love to see technology blend in a bit more naturally with our surroundings. There are a lot of places I feel like this could replace today's interfaces. One example is your thermostat. This could just be embedded in a wall as the interface and we could have a modular device with a standardized interface that is more easily accessible and located somewhere else, while decoupling the actual thermostat functionality from its form. Another is a microwave. Maybe this could help us avoid filling our kitchens with plastic buttons that end up covered in grease. There are a lot of opportunities to allow technology to better blend in here.
Our dishwasher shines a red light on the floor when it’s running. I like the unobtrusive way this communicates state. It’s a quiet dishwasher, and you can’t really tell if it’s running purely by sound.
Our new washing machine uses Wi-Fi to send a notification when the wash is done. Also to remind me that the factory warranty has expired, and that I can purchase an extended warranty. Greaaaaat
This seems like a rather old-school way of thinking about ambient computing. How about AR glasses that let you hallucinate interfaces on both smart and dumb objects? Interfacing with smart objects would change their physical state, while interfacing with dumb objects would change their digital state.
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Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you.
A gadget mounted in your helmet could click softly as your head turns past cardinal points. You wouldn't even notice, consciously, but you would always know what direction you were facing.
Screens that change as they load, notifications every second, layout shifts, animations that serve no purpose, and more. It's driving me nuts to be honest.
I think there really is a space for computing that just exists around us, and interacts with the environment in ways you don't have to actively look at. As a plus, you'll save cycles for what you actually want to compute if you don't have to draw everything on a screen on top of 2000 layers of abstraction.
The example you give is exactly what I'm talking about: You already know which direction you're facing, if you take the time to learn how to notice your own internal information. You already have magnetic sensors in your head.
(E.g. https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-for-a-human-magneti... )
I've found that it's relatively easy to develop one's capabilities to be able to do things like: always know what time it is, always know where you are and your orientation, remember things, etc.
I think it would be a shame to replace human faculties with machines, like using a wheelchair even though your legs work fine and then after awhile your legs atrophy and are no longer fine, y'know? I worry that we are doing that to our brains.
Then you can turn off the clicks at cardinal points, and leave only the "that way to my campsite" click.
It would have a magnetic sensor to sample 3D orientation now and again (maybe per second), an inertial-platform chip for lower-powered moment-to-moment tracking and dead reckoning, and power up a GPS once in a while to get absolute position, correct the compass heading, and rebase the inertial platform. It would have a distinguished click for when you face the next way point, or your campsite.
I am partial to the idea of weak electric shocks instead of audio. But that might be a harder sell. People usually talk about shaker motors, but that is a recipe for needing lots of battery. I would rather the whole system weigh less than an AA cell, and run for weeks on a charge or button cell.
About the fingernail magnets, I recall stories about people who implanted magnets in their fingertips. It struck me as kind of dumb, vs gluing, although maybe the more nerve endings would make them more sensitive. The description was that near AC motors and transformers they could feel a vibration, and could tell whether metals were ferrous by touch. I expect you could get a sense of how conductive metal is by wiggling the magnet near it.
Another interesting story is a fellow (Danish, I believe?) who calls himself a cyborg because he was born (completely?) colorblind but attached an antenna to his head that allows him to hear a tone that changes depending on the color in front of him. At some point he began to hear these color-sounds in his dreams as well.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09265...
Your body already feels magnetic fields around you... you have iron in your blood.
It’s still a debate how animals sense the earths magnetic field. However, all theories rely on special adaptions and not on the extremely weak magnetic properties of blood.
Video --> https://youtu.be/_kwUuy5B6r0
I feel like people should watch "Demon Seed" and "Maximum Overdrive". Yeah they are just fictional horror movies, but I feel like we need to think about failure modes before we wire ourselves into this new "daemon-haunted" world irrevocably.
Ambient computing seems to mean that our kids will grow up in a kind of cartoon reality. I actually have a concern that people will have a hard time developing proper intuitions about the "real" world. (Like when little kids try to swipe on TVs. That's pretty innocent and even amusing.)
Our new washing machine uses Wi-Fi to send a notification when the wash is done. Also to remind me that the factory warranty has expired, and that I can purchase an extended warranty. Greaaaaat
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