Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.
Twitterspaces was developed by Indiana University as a research project into developing ways to evaluate ambient information systems. William R. Hazelewood from the project recently came to the Open University to give a talk on it and later very kindly set up a version for our users of Twitter (thank you!). In case you don't know what Twitter is, it can be pretty much summed up as this year's social networking sensation, a service that lets you “microblog”, you can post a message as often as you like up to 140 characters in length. You can post it from a web site, from a dedicated client, even your mobile phone. People can follow the messages you display and you can follow other people, you can easily reply to people too. Even though Twitter is centered around the individual with the help of an aggregated view of connected users it is quite a powerful way to build up a sense of community and like many other people at the OU I have been twittering away and enjoying the many conversations and resources that people post. One of the benefits Twitter can have for an organisation is that people can get involved regardless of where they are; you don't have to be at the headquarters to be part of this community. You may be already be familiar with PlanetOU, the page on this website dedicated to OU bloggers (you might also have come across it in a post by Stephen Downes), now PlanetOU has a presence on Twitter and the people followed by that user are the people who appear on our version of Twitterspaces (by the way follow @planetou in Twitter if you want to keep up to date with the latest information regarding this service).
In the talk, the term "ambient" was defined as a design quality, not a classification, which can explain why it is something that can be hard to define. In the original project the a large display was put up in a student common room showing the tweets (Twitter posts) of students who were likely to use that room. The design of the display was directed by the need to focus on the aesthetics of the surroundings, it was said that the notification noise for a new tweet was particularly hard to choose. Introducing this display did not really affect the frequency of tweets or what people wrote, but what it did do was increase a sense of belonging to a community, people seemed to like the screen and when it wasn't switched on they wanted it to be there. In keeping with its ambient qualities though, the display did not change the activities in the room (I'm summarising the findings a bit here, but a fuller explanation will be available in the conference paper: Twitterspace: Exploring methods of evaluation of large public ambient displays through in-situ studies, Hazlewood, W. R., Ryan, W., Makice, K., & Connelly, K. 2008).
The PlanetOU version of Twitterspaces has been available for a few days now and there have been a few queries about how people change settings or interact with it. The answer is that it is not really designed for interaction or as a Twitter client, the content of the text was not the main focus for the software but as a way to visualise activity. The metaphore used was one of a town square. If you sit and observe a town square you get a sense of what is going on, a level of activity. If the square is really busy you don't take everyone's conversations in, you don't know what everybody is up to, instead you get a sense of commotion. The Twitterspace display can tell you a lot of information in a glance. The display shows the last one hundred tweets from a community, this is dealt with as a queue, newer tweets in the queue are rendered brighter and larger than older tweets. Newer tweets also move more slowly than older tweets, although there is a random element to the speed. When the software checks for updates from Twitter, it assesses the staleness of posts, it uses the creation time of the post and will blur it according to its age and it will appear smaller than fresher posts (so if everybody stopped updating suddenly there would still be tweets but they would appear to be fading into the background, almost like they were walking into the sunset). The vertical position is the time of day the tweet was made at. The middle of the display is noon, bottom is midnight and the top is 1 am. The direction of the tweets is now just random but in the original version at Indiana University it meant students vs alumni. The queue size of one hundred tweets is deliberate, what this does is cause the rendering of the display to change quite dramatically according to the level of activity. If there are lots of posts in a close timeframe the tweets become tightly banded, they are not displayed over the entire display, the tweets will all be a similar size. This creates the sense of commotion in a town square as mentioned earlier (although at one point William R. Hazlewood thought our Twitterspace looked more like an "extremely busy train terminal"!), when you see it you would be forgiven for immediately wanting to know what was going on. When things are quieter the tweets will be dispersed and different sizes giving a sense of seeing a few people wandering around the town square but no commotion, things are quiet and people are relaxed.
It would be understandable to maybe think of ambient technology to be something that largely exists in academic papers, a science fiction world, or something that will only become commonplace many years from now, but this is not true, it is a concept that is starting to appear now. RSS is key to this, enabling data to be seamlessly piped between locations, uPNP is an attempt to make hardware integrate without lots of manual configuration, Flock might even have ambient properties as it picks up on certain sites and integrates the experience of using those sites into the browsing enviroment (e.g by providing a photo uploader to Facebook, all you need to do is log in, and Flock sorts out the rest). Not that ambient technology is always in the background though, Stuart Brown recently experienced an example of this technology as he walked past a high street chemist and was automatically sent an advert to his mobile phone. Dr. Patrick McAndrew, an academic at the OU with a keen interest in this field told me that he thought this example was quite telling, it was the first time Stuart had experienced this, and such an experience is rare, building the technology (in this case Bluetooth) has not been enough to make this happen, but on the other hand there are many technologies emerging with ambient properties.
This will be a very interesting field to watch over the next few years, the case of Twitterspaces has shown a meeting between Web 2.0 and ambient technology that produces a compelling view of a community. Such ideas might make it feel much more natural to work and play in geographically dispersed groups, and ambient information systems could be a great way to take in lots of information about our surroundings in an easy to consume way. For now why not enjoy a break in our town square and watch the world go by!
Re: An ambient view of PlanetOU: Twitterspaces
Hi, great post!
One of the things that I found to be really interesting about twitterspaces was that it allowed me to hear the OU twittersphere in action. I have my PC wired up to an amp and speakers so i turned off the screen, turned up the amp and pottered around the house.
For a while you hear nothing, then you hear the occasional *pop* as someone posts, and then you hear a flurry of *pops* as people reply. Hearing the twitters in this way really brought home to me that twitter is more than a `what are you doing?' medium, it's a tool to enable conversations.