Ambient Informatics

I wrote the original controlling software for a responsive bus bench – a rare on-campus collaboration between architecture and engineering – it was designed by the UCLA Architecture department and facilitated by our UCLA REMAP lab.

The lights in the bench communicate occupancy, arrival time in an intuitive yet non-textual manner, true to the ‘Ambient Informatics’ research proposal of ‘communicating when in a state of distraction’.

Software & controller have been ready & have been running near continuously since summer 2012; installation itself happened fall 2014, public launch early 2015.

Jeff Burke wrote final deployed lighting controller (and so much else), Adeola Bannis did some fantastic work w/ NDN, which was used to pub/sub the bus data.

Tools: HTML/CSS/C++/Python/NDN/Embedded ARM Controller

lighting test

lighting test

Screenshot

status monitor

status monitor

bus_analysis