The Ambient Calendar

It is becoming difficult to convey information from an everincreasing
number of digital sources to users in a condensed and meaningful
way. This growth has particularly occurred with peripheral information
sources. These are of general interest to users, but do no require
or typically command constant focus or attention. Examples include
weather, stock data, blogs, and calendars. Ambient Displays present information
unobtrusively in an intelligent fashion using abstract visual
cues and metaphors and have the possibility of acting as a complement
to information filtering systems. We describe the implementation of an
ambient display that contains elements representing time, weather, public
transport departure times, and the proximity of friends. An initial
impact study was undertaken and found a high sense of usefulness and
curiosity in the finished application and in the field as a whole.