Ambient Devices

Ambient Devices, Inc. is a privately held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA that designs and markets various ambient devices for display of information ranging from weather to traffic reports to stock quotes. The company was founded by David L. Rose, Ben Resner, and Pritesh Gandhi, and is a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab. The company also maintains the Ambient Information Network, a datacasting network presently hosted by Metrocall, a U.S. paging service. The service is similar to Microsoft's SPOT service.
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Ambient devices are new genre of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called "glanceable"). Ambient devices utilize pre-attentive processing to display information, the ability for the brain to perceive information without any apparent cognitive load. The New York Times Magazine announced ambient devices as one of the Ideas of the Year in 2002 on the heels of a start-up company, Ambient Devices, releasing their first product Ambient Orb. The Ambient Orb maps information to a linear color spectrum and displays the trend in the data.
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