For those not completely familiar with the concept of ambient devices:

Ambient devices are new genre of consumer electronics, characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called “glanceable”). Tie this at-a-glance technology into an internet enabled device and you get something like the Ambient Orb, “a glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the stock market, or the traffic on your homeward commute”.

I’ve never had an ambient device, but this Nabaztag (aka WiFi enabled rabbit) is cute enough to kinda make me want one. According to this Yahoo! Tech review, if you speak into its belly, it will tell you about the weather. If he smells your car keys, he’ll excitedly tell all your friends that you are home. And he can teach your other iAnimals how to talk back to you.

Adorable, so long as I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to a self-aware Nabaztag army at the bottom of my bed. But all creepy AI indications aside, ambient devices are offer an intriguing and fun way for us to digest information easier in this information overloaded world. I put out a message to the Organic offices for people to tell me about their thoughts and experiences with ambient technology. Their responses after the fold…

James Vreeland replied with ambient device praises:

I’ve done a little work on ambient devices/embedded systems over the past few years, and can only see this market expanding. Rapidly.

I did alpha testing the Chumby, and within weeks of tinkering, it had changed large parts of my daily routine. I found myself no longer compulsively checking a few key sites I visit (web stats, forums, feed readers) with anywhere near my regular frequency. A quick glance across the kitchen would set my mind at ease that my applications were stable/the world is not coming to an end/no one had outbid me on some silly trinket on eBay. Its been a GTD blessing in my horribly “constant partial attention” life.

However, to date my favorite is still one of the simplest, an umbrella that tells you whether or not to take it with you that day.

However, Chad Stoller reported that his experience with the Nabaztag was not so great:

It was a nightmare, but that was mostly due to the organic IT policies because our wireless network wouldn’t support it. The initial config required a hard cable connection and that didn’t make things easier.

Dan Neumann confirms the tedious setup of the Nabaztag:

It was fun once I got it up and running. The setup actualy didn’t require a hard cable, but is was a cumbersome process. We have an older version that does not have a mic, so you can’t talk to it.

It has good text to speech so you can have it read messages and rss feeds. You can send it music and its ears will dance. you can also program it to read all sorts of updates like the weather. It’s cute, but I lost interest in it pretty quickly.

Dan also volunteered to let me borrow his to try it out. Admittedly, after researching a little more, the Chumby seems like a more useful device, but the idea of a cute little bunny reading the newest blogs from The AV Club’s The Hater is just too funny to resist. I think I’ll take Dan up on the offer and report back on my first ambient device hands-on experience.

Marta Strickland