Analog Approach to Displaying Data 274
Lurker McLurker writes "
BBC News reports that
Ambient Devices, the MIT Media Lab spin-off which brought us the
Ambient Orb, have developed a new product, the Ambient Dashboard .
The orb changed colour to display information at a glance, for example turning red if the stock market is going down. The dashboard has three displays, similar to speedometers or barometers, to show the information of your choice, from stock market volumes to the pollen count." As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.
Fun for now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Damon,
Analog all the way (Score:5, Insightful)
Analog to Digital to Analog (Score:1, Insightful)
We use some type of fancy sensor to convert a real world analog signal to digital information, then we convert the digital information back to analog to humans can understand it intuitively?
Re:Ye Olde Weather Ball (Score:2, Insightful)
Weather ball red, colder weather ahead
Weather ball blue, warmer weather in view
Weather ball green, rain or snow is foreseen
Color blinking bright, no change in sight.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a new concept... (Score:1, Insightful)
The idea of having more 'socially acceptable' ways of displaying data is pretty much the output equivalent of the invention of the mouse, joystick, whatever. Sure, it's nice that you can use analogue needle thingies, but pretty much anything that isn't a monitor or a 7-seg display will fall into this category. And in the future we'll be seeing more of them.
Why? Because it's just about finding the most relevant way to display data.
I love the marketting spin: (Score:5, Insightful)
Via a nationwide wireless network called the Ambient Information Network. It works in a similar way to cell phones and receivers.
Translation:
There's a pager receiver inside. We send out national pages every few minutes which essentially contain packets of information on each of the possible displays.
It's still an innovative use of a nearly obsolete network. However, they can't gurantee free service for life though. When they go out of business, your nifty device is nothing unless you hack a computer interface into it, or get a pager account and find a way to attach the receiver into that account.
But it makes me smile to hear them say they have a network all for themselves - giving the impression that they own or control the network their messages are sent over.
-Adam
Re:Digital all the way (Score:3, Insightful)
A speaker cone, and its effect on the air pressure, is not quantized, but rather analogue plus random, the random components coming from amplifier noise and Brownian motion of the air it is driving.
The movement of hairs in the ear is also mostly analogue. Older Slashdotters may remember analogue frequency meters, which had an array of tuned reeds covering a fairly narrow band around the power frerquency of 50, 60 or 400Hz, and by looking at the white painted ends you could see a crude spectrum display. The reeds might be tuned in steps of 0.25 Hz, but the eye would pick out the curve and interpolate its peak to less than that. The ear mechanism is similar, there are many overlapping tuned filters, but the amplitude detection is at least semi-analogue.
The real world only becomes digital when you get down to doing things like counting photons, for example in astronomy using an image intensifier in front of a CCD, but even there the distribution in both time and frequency/energy of these photons is thermodynamic or if you prefer, statistical.
Many digital designs fail or are troublesome because the whizz-kids who think they know VHDL and can drive a toolset, forget about ANALOGUE things like transmission line effects on the PCB, or statistical things like timing jitter, which is ultimately caused by amplitude noise, a statistical thing, being summed with a signal of finite slew rate.
It is DIGITAL systems which are unable to make a sufficiently exact representation of the real world, for example 16 bit encoding is woefully inadequate for high quality audio.
Energy also comes in any quantity we like, the physical velocity of hot gas, for example, contains a random element, but because of partial ionisation its summation is not limited to the sum of permissible quantum states of individual atoms, which of course would be quantised.
So, it is a noisy analogue world, and digits superimposed thereon are simply discrete groups of noisy analogue levels. If you don't believe that statement, look at a PCI bus on a good analogue oscilloscope!
If you want to see something else which in theory should be digital, and therefore precise, exact and consistent, look at the trash software products of the Convicted Monopolist. Here the statistical component is indirect, caused by numerous semi-random human contributions at the design and coding stages, and a large degree of something which is neither analogue nor digital, nor even statistical, neither is it a variable (because its purpose is truly deterministic/monoploistic), nor a constant (because it produces output which is truly random insofar as it is totally uncorrelated with anything else), but is in fact the product of pure greed (a quasi-digital quantity, usually approximate by 1), pure arrogance(a dimensionless variable approaching infinity) and total incompetence (a dimensionless variable approaching zero). I will call this new property of matter Billness.