Personalizable ambient fixture

Ambient displays provide us with information in the background of our awareness. However, as each user has individual wishes and needs of how, which and when information is presented, the acceptance of ambient displays is low. In this paper we introduce an abstract output facility which provides personalization for ambient fixtures. We employ a notification system to enhance the capability of a fixture to display more than one variable. We evaluate our concept within a dual task experiment in comparison to preset notifications. The results show a level of self-interruption which is significantly lower than using preset notifications. Therefore our approach outperforms preset notifications and moves ambient displays closer to secondary displays in human-computer interaction.