Ambient Lamp Display in the Active Home Ubiquitous Computing Environment for Relaxing and Mediation

This paper describes the design and implementation of Tea Place. Tea Place is an ambient lamp display placed above a tea table in the ActiveHome ubiquitous computing environment. This ambient display system is intended to enhance a traditional tea table with multimodal interfaces for user relaxation and mediation. It detects user context (such as the color of tea in a cup) and displays abstract animation images using LED array reflected on the surface of tea, ambient sounds and wind blowing. It makes users to concentrate on drinking and increasing their intimacy on the table at home.