Response to Interactive Public Ambient Displays:
The four interaction phases (ambient, implicit, subtle, and personal) are based on how the interaction can be performed at different distances. I think the phases can be used to determine how much information can be actively delivered. The amount of deliverable information increases as a person getting closer to the display because of increase in readability and attention allocation. The hello wall project demonstrated this characteristic by showing more detailed information as the user approaches the display. However, explicit interaction is an expensive way of receiving information because it requires foreground attention. The active information delivery systems such as news broadcasting or advertisement would be interested on how to use the resource at a given phase to maximize the information throughput. So if in the future the public environment is filled with ambient displays, it would be nice if the person can walk through a hall way without explicit interaction but still receive a lot of relevant information.
Response to Toolkit and Interface & Proximity Toolkit:
Toolkit is a good way of making the interface designers to stay focused on the creative design and allowing fast interface changes in development iterations. However, I think the development of toolkit is not an easy task. It needs to be powerful, easy to use, and flexible at the same time. It also requires extensive documentation, tutorials, and continuous code maintains. Sometimes I can find a very good library or toolkit does exactly what I needed, but it had a small bug that I can't get around. A good toolkit is expensive to have because those factors will impact its adoption. Arguably a good toolkit example is the Qt toolkit (now Qt framework) currently owned by Nokia. However, it took Trolltech many years of effort to reach that stage.
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