The future is 'ambient' - art. no. 60740J

The research field of ambient media starts to spread rapidly and first applications for consumer homes are on the way. Ambient media is the logical continuation of research around media. Media has been evolving from old media (e.g. print media), to integrated presentation in one form (multimedia - or new media), to generating a synthetic world (virtual reality), to the natural environment is the user-interface (ambient media), and will be evolving towards real/synthetic undistinguishable media (bio-media or bio-multimedia). After the IT bubble was bursting, multimedia was lacking a vision of potential future scenarios and applications. Within this research paper the potentials, applications, and market available solutions of mobile ambient multimedia are studied. The different features of ambient mobile multimedia are manifold and include wearable computers, adaptive software, context awareness, ubiquitous computers, middleware, and wireless networks. The paper especially focuses on algorithms and methods that can be utilized to realize modern mobile ambient systems.