Ambient Dashboard | The Incrementalist

While I always liked the idea of Ambient Devices, their first product, the Orb, felt very wishy-washy to me. I like the concept of output devices (in that case a single “pixel”) that can convey general information to me at a subconscious level, but there are also times when I’d like to “zoom in” to get more quantitative detail.

That’s why I find their new Dashboard much more appealing. The basic pitch is this: a battery-powered set of three physical gauges that can display your choice of metrics. The information arrives over old pager networks, so there are absolutely no wires involved. To change which information a gauge is showing, you simply insert a piece of plastic with a different set of tick marks. (If you look closely at the photo, you can see that they use the old punched-card system to detect which of the—hmm—1024? possible data channels the card represents.) The device itself is squarely in Brookstone territory at $150. The data service is free for generic channels like the Dow index, regional forecast, and presidential approval rating, but you pay $6.95 a month to get the personalized ones like pending email count, minutes until next meeting, and traffic congestion. With a nod to their early-adopter market, they also include a couple cards corresponding to developer channels—I’ll have to take another look when they open up their developer program in earnest.

Michael Higgins

I dunno, I kind of have the opposite reaction. This one doesn’t seem very organic to me, and the use of gauges is just so obvious. A lot of what I like about the ambient idea is the metaphorical flair… this one has a certain retro-geek thing going on, but there’s not much artistry to it.
http://retrovirus.com Joe Hughes

Yes, I’d agree that it’s certainly less of an objet d’art than the Orb. However, color-only interfaces (like those chargers with a single LED that switch from red to green) are the bane of my existence, so I really appreciate the positional aspects of this one.

It sounds like you’re reacting to the lack of novelty of the output device itself, and you’re right about that in some sense—simple gauges certainly have a long pedigree. However, I think that real physical gauges have some useful advantages as a low-cost one-dimensional data output device:
1. It has a very high resolution, both in terms of the textual markings, and the range of values it can represent (though this latter is probably limited by their hardware/bandwidth)
2. Since the display is physical, you can probably hear it change. (I was thinking last night that I would’ve tried to give each gauge a subtly different audio signature.)

Also, I do find the selection of data stream by switching the physical scale to be rather elegant. It’s one of the less goofy instantiations of Ishii’s “phycons”.
http://retrovirus.com Joe Hughes

Pete said:

Kind of neat, in a quirky way, but I think it is hopeless commercially. Will soon become a paperweight.

Yes, unfortunately Ambient is probably a few years before their time. I’ll bet that they’re crossing their fingers that they can get enough “executive gift-givers” to fund them until mesh-network capillaries extend from enough people’s home broadband arteries that they can ditch the centralized pager-network dribble model. Personally, I would be interested in having glanceable, high-contrast readouts for things like home energy consumption, network uplink throughput, and minutes until the next scheduled bus (route selectable by card). And tell me you wouldn’t like to have a physical gauge that you could tie to the output of an infotron of your choice?
http://www.successimage.com George “Desktop” Bailey

I too would be interested in glanceable, quick view readouts, especially for things that matter to me during the day. Things like instantaneous relative cost of energy would be usefull, but the prevaling “temperature” or “wind speed” of certain other residents emotional state would be very useful (yes dear…) – hurricane guage?!