91.548 Lab 2: Ambient Displays

due February 12

1. Read the 5 papers handed out in class:

   • Glass That Glows and Gives Stock Information, New York Times, June 10, 2003.

   • Pinwheels: Visualizing Information Flow in an Architectural Space, Ishii, Ren, and Frei, CHI 2001.

   • Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and Brown, 1995.

   • Toilet Paper as an Ambient Display, web discussion, 2003.

   • A Peripheral Display Toolkit, Matthews, Rattenbury, Carter, Dey, and Mankoff, UIST 2003.

2. Think up your own ambient display idea, and prototype it using Handy Cricket or other available technology.

   Your demonstration must make some kind of TCP connection (e.g., HTTP) to an existing web server, parse the data received from the server, and then create some kind of tangible/kinesthetic/audible/etc representation of this on-line data.

   Keep in mind the Notification, Transitions, and Abstractions framework proposed in the Matthews et al. paper.