Jennic now offers a reduced-complexity network stack called Jen-Net, which has about a third of the memory overhead of Zigbee. Their microcontrollers and modules have both stacks in ROM, and applications can run either. This is something I need to study carefully for the aiosphere, which Jennic looks good for anyway. Here is a cursory overview of Zigbee dev kits, which favors Jennic’s offering. Reading their support forums, though, sugests that all will not be smooth sailing if I select this platform for development. Next stop, Ember.

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.

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.

Many simple output devices, LED and text, could make interesting clocks. I like the idea of a little text display which is made into a clock by the network driver. As well as the LED ideas I have talked about before.  I also like the idea, strange or not, of a generic system which is turned into a clock by software somewhere on the network.  Check out PC Mag’s collection of geeky clocks.