Ambient intelligence is the vision of a technology that will become invisibly embedded in our natural surroundings, present whenever we need it, enabled by simple and effortless interactions, attuned to all our senses, adaptive to users and context-sensitive, and autonomous. High-quality information access and personalized content must be available to everybody, anywhere, and at any time. This book addresses ambient intelligence used to support human contacts and accompany an individual's path through the complicated modern world. From the technical standpoint, distributed electronic intelligence is addressed as hardware vanishing into the background. Devices used for ambient intelligence are small, low-power, low weight, and (very importantly) low-cost; they collaborate or interact with each other; and they are redundant and error-tolerant. This means that the failure of one device will not cause failure of the whole system. Since wired connections often do not exist, radio methods will play an important role for data transfer. This book addresses various aspects of ambient intelligence, from applications that are imminent since they use essentially existing technologies, to ambitious ideas whose realization is still far away, due to major unsolved technical challenges.

One man struggles to survive in a dystopian near-future New York City in this acclaimed novel that “performs feats of brilliance on so many levels” (Entertainment Weekly). In a decaying and violent near-future New York, the remnants of civic order are maintained with brute force by the conglomerate Dryco. But even Dryco is falling apart from the inside. Seamus O’Malley is bodyguard and confidant to Mister Dryden, the CEO, and an admirer of Dryden’s personal femme fatale, Avalon. But what begins as a simple case of unrequited love quickly becomes a desperate chance for survival as corporate intrigue, murderous family rivalries, and perverse subcultures take over O’Malley’s life. Drawing comparisons to the nightmarish vision of J. G. Ballard and the linguistic brilliance of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Ambient marked the “wonderfully inventive” debut of Philip K. Dick Award–winning author Jack Womack (The New York Times Book Review). “Bleakly comic . . . A cynical tour de force through the meanest of streets. Ambient is less prophecy than documentary, demonstrating how the best science fiction is about as future-oriented as today’s Daily News.” —The Village Voice “[Womack] succeeds in balancing blistering social commentary with shrewd literary experimentation . . . Flecked with black humor, this is speculative fiction at its eerie best.” —Entertainment Weekly

Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan, and what it means to use media as a resource for personal mood regulation. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation. Focusing on how an atmosphere works to reshape those dwelling within it, Roquet shows how ambient aesthetics can provide affordances for reflective drift, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and novelists in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient as a style generating “calm, and a space to think,” exploring what it means to cultivate an ambivalent tranquility set against the uncertain horizons of an ever-shifting social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding the emphasis on “reading the air” in Japanese culture, Ambient Media documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of the increasing deployment of mediated moods. Arguing against critiques of mood regulation that see it primarily as a form of social pacification, Roquet makes a case for understanding ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective attunement—one that enables the indirect shaping of social behavior while also allowing individuals to feel like they are the ones ultimately in control.

The metaphor of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) tries to picture a vision of the future where all of us will be surrounded by 'intelligent' electronic environments, and this ambient has claims to being sensitive and responsive to our needs. Ambient Intelligence without invasion of privacy represents a long-term vision for the EU Information Society Technologies Research programme. A strong multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach is a key requirement for large-scale technology innovation and the development of effective applications. Up to now, most of the books and papers related to AmI focus their analysis on the technology potential only. An important feature of this volume is the link between the technology - through the concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent interface - and the human experience of interacting in the world - through a neuro-psychological vision centred on the concept of 'presence'. Presence - the sense of being there - is the experience of projecting one's mind through media to other places, people and designed environments. The combination of recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience - which make it possible to acquire a better understanding of the human aspects of presence, and the breakthroughs at the level of the enabling technologies make it increasingly possible to build novel systems based on this understanding. The goal of this volume is to assess the technologies and processes that are behind the AmI vision, in order to help the development of state-of-the-art applications. More in detail, this volume aims at supporting researchers and scientists, interested in the understanding and exploiting the potential of AmI.

An engaging look at how mobile games are increasingly part of our day-to-day lives and the ways that we interact across real as well as digital landscapes. We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill--waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson examine how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives. They show that as mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a digitally saturated world. We are digital wayfarers, moving constantly among digital, social, and social worlds.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

In a world supported by Ambient Intelligence (AmI), various devices embedded in the environment collectively use the distributed information and the intelligence inherent in this interconnected environment. A range of information from sensing and reas- ing technologies is used by distributed devices in the environment. The cooperation between natural user interfaces and sensor interfaces covers all of a person’s s- roundings, resulting in a device environment that behaves intelligently; the term “Ambient Intelligence” has been coined to describe it. In this way, the environment is able to recognize the persons in it, to identify their individual needs, to learn from their behavior, and to act and react in their interest. Since this vision is influenced by a lot of different concepts in information proce- ing and combines multi-disciplinary fields in electrical engineering, computer science, industrial design, user interfaces, and cognitive sciences, considerable research is needed to provide new models of technological innovation within a multi-dimensional society. Thus the AmI vision relies on the large-scale integration of electronics into the environment, enabling the actors, i.e., people and objects, to interact with their surrounding in a seamless, trustworthy, and natural manner.