AmbiWall

Submitted by anuj on Tue, 09/22/2009 - 23:26

Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal
Collaborators:
Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal
Collaborators: Anuj Tewari, Dhawal Mujumdar, Mila Schultz

Overview:
To create an ambient display that visualizes data related to a particular context (energy levels, stock values or even digg/twitter) and to create a musical canvas which would allow individuals to add to this continuous stream of musical data. The motivation in our case is multifold:

  1. Providing a smart and interactive visual decoration.
  2. Representation of real time information in ambient form.
  3. To allow the users to create music.

 
Inspiration/Related work:

Normally, ambient display resides in the environment of the user rather than on the screen of a desktop computer (galleries, elevators etc). It has the goal of presenting information without distracting or burdening the user. There has been much research in ambient display. Some of them that interested us were:
• Sideshow , which uses a sidebar on the windows desktop to provide regularly updated peripheral awareness of a broad range of information from virtually any accessible web site or database (Cadiz, venolia, Jancke and Gupta, 2002).
• BusTraffic, inspired by Mondrian, creates an informative art installation to represent the real-time local bus traffic conditions (Skog, Ljungblad and Holmquist, 2003).
• InfoCanvas, uses a beach scene to represent multiple real-time information (Plaue, Miller, Stasko 2004).
 

Tentative system description:

  1. The system would be a multitouch interface that shows an audio track. The far right end of the screen would represent the piece of track being played, and the part left to it, would represent the music to be played in the future. (The figure shown below is a quick and rough estimate of what the interface would look like).
  2. The display would be ambient and continuous.
  3. When no user is around the system, it would create music based on the data source.
  4. When a user comes near, he/she can modify the audio track with changes of their own and enjoy listening to it.
  5. Various layers of the track might represent different musical instruments or different chords/notes.
  6. The intensity of the musical variations would be a representative of the state of the data source.

 
Usage scenarios:

  1. In an office, where the display could be visualizing the stocks when not being touched by anyone. When stock prices rise, the tempo of the music will increase. Whereas, when stock prices go down the tempo will decrease. On being touched by a user, the basic track would still be derived from stock values, but the interface would also allow the user to introduce their changes into the existing track.
  2. In a collaborative space, where people can collectively add to the track while listening to the music they produce.

 
Project goals/Research questions:

  1. To understand the process of design of part ambient, part interactive interfaces.
  2. To analyze how such interfaces can result in social interactions (co-located or otherwise).

 
Possible extensions:

  1. Replicating the same framework for other forms of art, like sketching.
  2. Extending the interface for children.

 
Team Members:

 
References:

[1] J.J. Cadiz, Gina Venolia, Gavin Jancke, Anoop Gupta (2002): Designing and deploying an information awareness interface. Proc.The conference on Computer supported cooperative work, New  Orleans, Louisiana, USA, : 314-323, ACM Press.
[2] Tobias Skog, Sara Ljungblad and Lars Erik Holmquist (2003): Between Aesthetics and Utility: Designing Ambient Information Visualizations. Proc. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, Seattle, Washington :239-240, IEEE Press.
[3] Christopher Plaue, Todd Miller, John Stasko (2004): Is a picture worth a thousand words?: an evaluation of information awareness displays. Proc. The conference on Graphics interface, London, Ontario, Canada :117-126, Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society Press.