Ambient Orb

» see ambientdevices.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ambient Devices came out of the MIT Media Lab in 2001, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts by David L. Rose with Ben Resner, Nabeel Hyatt and Pritesh Gandhi. The Orb shipped in 2002 and the New York Times Magazine put it in that year's list of ideas worth noticing. It was a frosted glass ball about the size of a grapefruit with a lamp inside, and the only thing it ever did was change color.

You plugged it in. There was no network to join and no account to make. Inside was a receiver listening to an encoded FM radio subcarrier, and Ambient leased broadcast capacity across the United States to push a small stream of numbers out to every device at once. The default feeds were free. Around seven dollars a month bought you a specific one, so the Orb on your desk could be watching a single stock, or how bad your drive home was about to be.

The line grew: a Weather Beacon in 2003, a Weather Forecaster and a Dashboard in 2004, a datacasting kit for developers in March 2005, an Umbrella in 2007 whose handle lit up when rain was coming, an Energy Joule the same year, an alarm clock in 2011. Brookstone licensed a five-day forecaster and sold it in shopping malls. Then in 2019 Ambient stopped transmitting, and every one of those objects went inert at the same moment, regardless of who owned it or what they had paid.

~ the case file ~

~ glanceable ~

Rose's argument was that people want information but will not spend attention getting it, so the information should arrive in the periphery of your vision and take no reading at all. He called it glanceable. A color you notice from across the room while doing something else costs you nothing, where a number on a screen costs you a whole interruption.

Twenty years later the argument has clearly won and the hardware clearly lost. Everything the Orb wanted to be became a notification or a colored dot on a lock screen, delivered by a device you were already carrying and never bought for that reason.

~ the network was the product ~

The Ambient Information Network is the reason the Orb worked in 2002, when almost no home had wifi and configuring anything meant a serial cable. It is also the reason none of these devices survive. Microsoft's SPOT watches ran on the same family of idea, a nationwide FM broadcast pushing data one way to dumb receivers, and MSN Direct went dark in 2012 with the same result.

When you own the transport, your hardware lives exactly as long as you are willing to keep paying for spectrum. Brookstone's forecaster owners found this out first, cut off in February 2018 while the rest of the network was still running, and everyone else got there at the end of 2019. Ambient Devices still has a website up, a stale corporate page describing utility deployments in the present tense.

~ what it could never do here ~

An Orb bought in Ankara would have been dead on arrival. The whole trick depended on a nationwide American FM broadcast, so outside the coverage of that network the object had no way of learning anything and no fallback that did not exist yet. This was never a product that got to Turkey late, it was one that could not be shipped here at all.

That gives the class of one-way datacast gadgets a strange status in my memory. I read about them at the time in translated tech coverage the way you read about a train line in another country, aware of the schedule and with no way to stand on the platform.

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