Voice Activated Interactive Ambient Information Display

Normally the primary purpose of an information display is to convey information. If it can be aesthetically interesting, that is an added bonus. Recent research experiments with reversing this imperative. An information display, which is first aesthetically pleasing and second is able to display information, is designed and implemented. The display presents an e-mail title in a visual form as a collage of images each image corresponding to one or more words. It next filters the collage through aesthetic properties specified by an artist, such as colors, texture, and shape. This filter renders the original collage as a pleasing art. We propose an extension of this work by: adding a voice activation module; displaying information of user’s request (versus displaying e-mail titles only); and presenting the display in a form of a decorative digital painting hanging on the wall. The advantages of this approach are: being ambient in a sense of: entering person’s attention when needed, and largely disappearing into the environment when not needed; and being interactive as in providing information per user’s interest through speech recognition. This produces new interactive, ambient system for aesthetic information display on user’s demand. Keywords-ubiquitous computing, speech recognition, image collage, aesthetic display, human-machine interface.