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.