An alternative approach to ambient information, Chumby will undoubtedly be very cool. I hope they do very well. I am certainly going to get one! They plan to be open, hackable, extensible. They are already starting a collection of widgets.

I have been building devices and researching interface experiments for years but only stumbled onto Rob Faludi when researching other Xbee projects.  Looking at his blog archives, he’s been doing interesting things for a couple of years at least.  Wonder why I’ve not run across him till now?  He points to New Micro’s useful Xbee USB carrier, which is just the ticket for a quik Xbee-PC connection.

Rob also has been experimenting with some really cool networked objects.  Check out his slinky metronome, for example.

I have been thinking for some time of a keychain device which could feed net info to the wearer while they are in the home.  Could as easily be a pin/brooch/ring.  This silly product line makes no sense to me, honestly seems like a hige waste of resources, but at least they have created a zigbee keychain interface, which is very cool.

Check this out.  This is only vaguely related to ambient informatics, but it is inspiring for its out of the box thinking.
There are lots of great water ideas for ambient informatics: someone at Stanford made a fountain, the height of which was driven by the Dow.  Of course, they used bootloads of clunky and complex computing resources to make this happen.  With Atmosphericon you could create the most basic D-A pump driver mechanism, and a simple script on the PC side could drive it.

What about many pumps, or many valves, each tied to a different data source?  What about pulling the color aspect from the above idea, so that each data source was easily distinguishable?  This would be beautiful!  See the water music machines of Trimpin for more valve fun.  (can anyone find me a better link?).

What about weather?  A fountain might be a nice way to indicate weather predictions.  If, as you head out the door in the morning, your fountain is running strong and high, you had better take your umbrella!