eSense and similar initiatives aim at integrating local, personal sensory information, such as your heart rate while you are snowboarding, and delivering it through your cell phone to your friends, a kind of ambient extension of twitter, facebook, myspace.

The key here is the idea of the cell phone as the gateway, and the realization that there must eventually be standard infrastructural mechanisms for connecting sensor networks to the global information network.

At a cafe today I saw a wonderful collection of antique jack in the boxes.  It occurs to me that these could be used instead of a traditional baby monitor.  (of course, the aiosphere cannot be used for mission-critical or safety-critical systems).  I’d probably build them such that they can both launch and reset themselves.  They would pair with a device at the baby, perhaps a stuffed animal, that would detect the baby’s waking and trigger the popup and music downstairs.  The parent could then go upstairs, calm the baby, then push a button on the stuffed animal to reset it.  Or, perhaps it automatically resets when the baby quiets.  If a user intervention is required, it should be something more subtle than a button.  Turn the animal’s head or something?

All these paradigms are slightly different. All are very interesting. All inform the aiosphere in one way or another.

Here are some resources:

• Wikipedia’s entry on Tangible computing.
• Proceedings from Subtle Technology Symposium 2007.
• William Hazlewood’s paper on design studies for ubicomp interfaces.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield, the book I’m reading right now.
• Texts date very quickly in this rapidly evolving field, but Ambient Intelligence remains a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of the challenges in the field.
• Pousman and Stasko’s paper on the taxonomy of ambient information systems. A good overview of the complex of related fields.
• An interesting idea: an ambient information soundscape.
• MIT’s Ambient Intelligence Group. Approaches tend to be a bit too complicated, but hey, they’re research. And the aggregate is very inspiring.

A great feature to add to my aiosphere service would be network visualizations for a person’s devices and connections, and their activities. Here is a nice article on some visualizations out there. I especially like the look of fidg’t.