Some thoughts about Vogel's paper

1. A better visualization for ambient display?
Vogel has done a good job visualizing personal information with various levels of details corresponding to implicit or explicit interactions. However, in the ambient display where there is almost only public information, the display on the screen, well, makes quite little sense (Fig. 1). They are just snapshots of information of everyone.

Fig 1. Snapshot of video of Vogel's

Even though we can still get to know how the weather is along the week, we might need a better visualization with regard to some other types of information such as people's schedule, emails, etc. Like what's mentioned in the future direction, people might want to do some cooperative work using the system. It would help if we can enable this from the ambient display level. For example, in the ambient display level, we could merge people's schedule and reflect the best time slot for a lab meeting.

2. A ‘discretely continuous mapping’ framework.
Having read another paper about 'Proximity', I realize there is something common in the 'Proximity' design. Part of the nature of 'Proximity' is mapping the output of the system to user's implicit or explicit interactions. And one of the goals of such mapping is to enable smooth transition between different states as well as sensitive enough responses to users' interactions. To accomplish this, both papers use a framework where firstly discrete 'regions' are defined and then continuous functions are applied within these 'regions'. Note that these 'regions' can be defined using territory (e.g. the 4 regions in Vogel's) or using specific gestures (e.g. 'palm away' or 'palm facing' in Vogel's).