Pervasive Visualisation

We have seen the face of the near future with embed­ded dis­plays in refri­ger­at­ors and RFID tags so you can track a par­cel as it speeds (hope­fully) on its way. One of the com­pan­ies doing some innov­at­ive work in this area is Ambi­ent. I recalled their won­der­ful glow­ing sphere that reacted to the changes in a par­tic­u­lar stock price, or the weather using a wire­less con­nec­tion inter­net con­nec­tion. Cool, but not some­thing that I would imme­di­ately jump at. A trial bal­loon they have raised lately has me a little more inter­ested. They call it the Ambi­ent Clock and it has a unique way of visu­al­iz­ing your appoint­ments for the day, wire­lessly acquired from your Goggle cal­en­dar. Cool. But its really the visu­al­isa­tion of this inform­a­tion that cap­tures the ima­gin­a­tion. The Ambi­ent Clock shows booked time as solid bars stretch­ing around the ‘face’ of the clock. It fur­ther cal­cu­lates travel time based on inform­a­tion in the Google cal­en­dar and shows ‘prep’ or travel time as a dot­ted leader to the event bar. The face of the clock changes col­our to indic­ate whether there are no pending appoint­ments (blue) to yel­low for an appoint­ment within 10 minutes and finally to orange dur­ing an event.
Cur­rently, Ambi­ent is offer­ing the clock as a Google wid­get and func­tions as though an actual phys­ical object. They offer that if there is interest they might pro­duce a few. This is some­thing I could really see stick­ing up on the fridge or some other con­veni­ent sur­face.