Assessing the Suitability of Context Information for Ambient Display

With the advance of pervasive technology, information from both the physical and virtual world is increasingly accessible to developers. Context-aware applications may consume relevant aspects of this information as they support user tasks. When conveying information to people, the mechanism for presentation must be carefully considered. As ambient devices are centred on the notion of calm-technology, it is logical that certain types of data lend themselves to ambient display more easily than others. In this paper we present our initial investigations into the properties of contextual information best suited for display using ambient technologies. We present the feature set extracted from our investigation, and apply examples that satisfy these criteria to our prototype ambient device, the visual calendar.