Ambient devices are a new genre of consumer electronics

Consumer electronics

Consumer electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, most often in entertainment, communications and office productivity. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver...

 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

Cognitive load

The term cognitive load is used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load related to the executive control of working memory . Theories contend that during complex learning activities the amount of information and interactions that must be processed simultaneously can either under-load, or...

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The New York Times Magazine

The New York Times Magazine

The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...

announced ambient devices as one of the Ideas of the Year in 2002 on the heels of a start-up company, Ambient Devices

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,...

, releasing their first product Ambient Orb, a frosted-glass ball lamp which maps information to a linear color spectrum and displays the trend in the data. Other products in the ambient genre have since been produced, such as the wifi

WIFI

WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...

-enabled Chumby

Chumby

The Chumby is a consumer electronics product made by Chumby Industries, Inc.. It is an embedded computer which provides Internet and LAN access via a Wi-Fi connection. Through this connection, the Chumby runs various software widgets....

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Research on ambient devices and ambience began at Xerox Parc

Xerox PARC

PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....

 with a paper co-written by Mark Weiser

Mark Weiser

Mark D. Weiser was a chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the United States. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988.-Biography:...

 and John Seely Brown

John Seely Brown

John Seely Brown is a researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bent towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities....

 entitled Calm Computing. Associated fields include Ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems...

 (also known as Ubicomp) and Calm technology.