Ambient Awareness

Ambient Awareness is a pilot project (Ambient Intelligent Tent) from the University of Hamburg Applied Science. This joint project between the departments of Design and Computer Science is being lead by Professor Franziska Hübler and Jeremy Abbett (Truth Dare Double Dare) from the Design department and Professor Dr. Kai von Luck and Professor Dr. Gunter Klemke from Computer Science.

A mix of design and computer science students involved include: Ali Rahimi, Florian Burka, Gesa Troch, Helene All, Henrik Brauer, Henryk Wollik, Janina Mertz, Judith Stryczek, Julia Pressburger, Kai Rosseburg, Kathrin Weigelt, Larissa Müller, Malinka Gdanietz, Marcus Rödiger, Martin Tischmann, Matthias Vogt, Oliver Dreschke, Piotr Wendt, Sebastian Gregor, Sören Voskuhl, Sven Tennstedt, Svenja Keune, Thomas Schulz.

What is ambient awareness? It is similar to being physically near someone and picking up on his/her mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of one’s eye.

What is ambient intelligence? Ambient intelligence, a sub-genre of ubiquitous computing, refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence are systems and computing that are typically embedded in the environment and have a contextual awareness of the user. To better understand ambient intelligence one has to be informed about ubiquitous computing. The term “ubiquitous computing” was coined by Mark Weiser 1998 and refers to the computer processing that is integrated into our everyday objects and activities. Ubiquitous computing is the third wave of computing that was preceded by personal/desktop computing and before that mainframe computing. Each era is in reference to the ratio of computers to people. In the mainframe computing era there was typically one computer for several computers. In personal/desktop computing there was one computer per person. With ubiquitous computing there are many computers for one person.